Top 300 Susanna Clarke Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “The walls were hung with a series of gigantic paintings in gilded frames of great complexity, all depicting the city of Venice, but the day was overcast, a cold stormy rain had set in, and Venice – that city built of equal parts of sunlit marble and sunlit sea – was drowned in a London gloom.”

— Susanna Clarke

302. “I estimate that in six months’ time the bones will be white and clean. I will gather them up and take them to the empty niche in the third north-western hall. I will place Valentine Ketterley next to the biscuit-box man. In the middle I will place the long bones tied together with twine. On the right I will place the skull. On the left I will place a box containing all the small bones.”

— Susanna Clarke

303. “She had the sweetest way of saying my name and smiling at the same time, and every time she did so, my heart turned over.”

— Susanna Clarke

304. “The House was particularly silent. No birds flew; no birds sang. Where had they all gone? It seemed they found the cloud-haunted World as oppressive as I did. In the Sixth Western Hall I found them at last. They were gathered there, perched on the Shoulders and Heads of every Statue, on Plinths and on Columns, sitting silently, waiting.”

— Susanna Clarke

305. “I took his poor, broken head into my lap and cradled it. ‘Your good looks are gone,’ I told him. ‘But you mustn’t worry about it. This unsightly condition is only temporary. Don’t be sad. Don’t fear. I will place you somewhere where the fish and the birds can strip away all this broken flesh. It will soon be gone. Then you will be a handsome skull and handsome bones.”

— Susanna Clarke

306. “If magic does not have friends in Yorkshire where may we find them?”

— Susanna Clarke

307. “I have never seen a live monkey in the House.”

— Susanna Clarke

308. “In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.”

— Susanna Clarke

309. “But the sound that came out of his mouth was no sound at all; it was the emptied skin of sound without flesh or bones.”

— Susanna Clarke

310. “The world was constantly speaking to Ancient Man.”

— Susanna Clarke

311. “This unsightly condition is only temporary. Don’t be sad. Don’t fear. I will place you somwhere where the fish and the birds can strip away all this broken flesh. It will soon be gone. Then you will be a handsome skull and handsome bones. I will put you in good order and you can rest in the Sunlight and Starlight.”

— Susanna Clarke

312. “Saint Oswald put his head out of Heaven and cried, “Do you have to shout so loud? I am not deaf! What do you want? And put down that candlestick! It was expensive!” During their holy and blessed lives Saint Kentigern and Saint Bridget had been a monk and a nun respectively; they were full of mild, saintly patience. But Saint Oswald had been a king and a soldier, and he was a very different sort of person.”

— Susanna Clarke

313. “A heap of shining guineas was lying there. Mrs Brandy picked up one of the coins and examined it. It was as though she held a ball of soft yellow light with a coin at the bottom of it.”

— Susanna Clarke

314. “Napoleon Buonaparte, it was said, was scouring France to find a magician of his own – but with no success. In London the Ministers were quite astonished to find that, for once, they had done something the Nation approved.”

— Susanna Clarke

315. “Let us examine the case of rings. Rings have long been considered peculiarly suitable for this sort of magic by virtue of their small size.”

— Susanna Clarke

316. “I do not believe you have ever given your friends a moment’s anxiety – except for worrying that this wicked world would quickly take advantage of someone so honest.”

— Susanna Clarke

317. “This search that you and I are embarked on, it’s a truly great project. Momentous. One of the most important in humanity’s history. The knowledge we seek isn’t something new. It’s old. Really old. Once upon a time people possessed it and they used it to do great things, miraculous things. They should have held on to it. They should have respected it. But they didn’t. They abandoned it for the sake of something they called progress. And it’s up to us to get it back.”

— Susanna Clarke

318. “It seemed that it was not only live magicians which Mr. Norrell despised. He had taken the measure of all the dead ones too and found them wanting.”

— Susanna Clarke

319. “Today the subject of my research is’ – at this point he looked up from what he was doing and smiled at me – ‘you.’ He has a most charming smile when he remembers to use it. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘What are you trying to find out? Do you have a hypothesis about me?’ ‘I do.’ ‘What is it?’ ‘I can’t tell you that. It might influence the data.’ ‘Oh! Yes. That is true. Sorry.’ ‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘It’s natural to be curious.”

— Susanna Clarke

320. “Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics – in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.”

— Susanna Clarke

321. “It is not his fault that he does not see things the way I do.”

— Susanna Clarke

322. “Perhaps the wisdom of birds resides, not in the individual, but in the flock, the congregation.”

— Susanna Clarke

323. “I thought that it was unkind to punish him for something he can’t help. It is not his fault that he does not see things the way I do.”

— Susanna Clarke

324. “He had a very young man’s belief in the absolute rightness of his own cause and the absolute wrongness of everyone else’s.”

— Susanna Clarke

325. “I no longer feel quite so alarmed when a nonsensical word in my Journal gives rise to a mental image that I cannot account for. Do not be anxious, I tell Myself. It is the House. It is the House enlarging your understanding.”

— Susanna Clarke

326. “Strange finished: “People have such odd notions about magicians. They wanted me to tell them about vampyres.”

— Susanna Clarke

327. “In May 1976 Arne-Sayles wrote a letter to the director of the museum, asking to borrow the head so that he could perform a magical rite of his own invention, transfer the seer’s knowledge to himself and so usher in a New Age for Mankind. To Arne-Sayles’s astonishment, the director refused.”

— Susanna Clarke

328. “His mouth was long and mobile, red and oddly wet.”

— Susanna Clarke

329. “This is what I call a Distributary World – it was created by ideas flowing out of another world. This world could not have existed unless that other world had existed first. Whether this world is still dependent on.”

— Susanna Clarke

330. “Saints!’ said Merowdis, rather alarmed at this. ‘I never thought of Papa as a saint before!’ ‘I meant you,’ said Ysolde. ‘Me!’ ‘You have visions. You can’t see any difference between animals and people. You can’t see any difference between spiders and people. And you’re really only happy when you’re in church. Or in a wood.”

— Susanna Clarke

331. “It contained a spell for turning Members of Parliament into useful members of society and now, just when Uncle Auberon thought he had a use for it, he could not find it.”

— Susanna Clarke

332. “I left the Embrace of the Faun and wandered miserably through the House. I believed that I was mad – or that I had been mad – or else that I was becoming mad now. Whichever way it was, it was a terrifying prospect. After a while I decided that this way of going on did no good at all.”

— Susanna Clarke