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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d535cf9 | For a moment or two before the spell took effect, he was aware of all the sounds around him: rain splashing on metal and leather, and running down canvas; horses shuffling and snorting; Englishmen singing and Scotsmen playing bagpipes; two Welsh soldiers arguing over the proper interpretation of a Bible passage; the Scottish captain, John Kincaid, entertaining the American savages and teaching them to drink tea (presumably with the idea tha.. | magic | Susanna Clarke | |
| 9fe1218 | A Nottinghamshire man called Tubbs wished very much to see a fairy and, from thinking of fairies day and night, and from reading all sorts of odd books about them, he took it into his head that his coachman was a fairy. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 2518c40 | Mr Honeyfoot and Mr Segundus, being magicians themselves, had not needed to be told that the library of Hurtfew Abbey was dearer to its possessor than all his other riches; and they were not surprized to discover that Mr Norrell had constructed a beautiful jewel box to house his heart's treasure. The bookcases which lined the walls of the room were built of English woods and resembled Gothic arches laden with carvings. There were carvings o.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 810b7a4 | In familiar surroundings our manners are cheerful and easy, but only transport us to places where we know no one and no one knows us, and Lord! how uncomfortable we become! | Susanna Clarke | ||
| a6fc124 | The moral, as Mr. Drawlight explained it, was that if Mr. Norrell hoped to win friends for the cause of modern magic, he must insert a great many more French windows into his house. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| e21281f | To Strange's unnautical eye, it looked very much as if the ship had simply lain down and gone to sleep. He felt that if he had been the Captain he would have spoken to her sternly and made her get up again. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| a745692 | Lascelles threw himself into the carriage, snorting with laughter and saying that he had never in his life heard of anything so ridiculous and comparing their snug drive through the London streets in Mr. Norrell's carriage to ancient French and Italian fables where fools set sail in milk-pails to fetch the moon's reflection from the bottom of a duckpond... | Susanna Clarke | ||
| f000b27 | Then Mr. Norrell roused himself and took down five or six books in a great hurry and opened them up - presumably searching out those passages which were full of advice for magicians who wished to awaken dead young ladies. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| fef9e74 | Mr. Lascelles whispered to Mr. Drawlight that he had not realized before that doing kind actions would lead to his being addressed in familiar terms by so many low people - it was most unpleasant - he would take care to do no more. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| aa2ab0c | Strange began to laugh. 'Well, Henry, you can cease frowning at me. If I am a magician, I am a very indifferent one. Other adepts summon up fairy-spirits and long-dead kings. I appear to have conjured the spirit of a banker. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| cb50631 | Soldiers, I am sorry to say, steal everything." He thought for a moment and then added, "Or at least ours do." How" -- | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 56edb89 | This is the genius of my enemy! Lock a door against him and all that happens is that he learns first how to pick a lock and second how to build a better one against you! | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 10e4361 | All of Man's works, all his cities, all his empires, all his monuments will one day crumble to dust. Even the houses of my own dear readers must - though it be for just one day, one hour - be ruined and become houses where the stones are mortared with moonlight, windowed with starlight and furnished with the dusty wind. It is said that in that day, in that hour, our houses become the possessions of the Raven King. Though we bewail the end o.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 5acc296 | Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| d8d1bf8 | That will teach me to meddle with magic meant for kings! Norrell is right. Some magic is not meant for ordinary magicians. Presumably John Uskglass knew what to do with this horrible knowledge. I do not. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 9ba633a | In the fish-market by the Grand Canal a fisherman sold Frank three mullet, but then almost neglected to take the money because his attention was given to the argument he was conducting with his neighbour as to whether the English magician had gone mad because he was a magician, or because he was English. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 723cea2 | And being a man - and a clever one - and forty-two years old, he naturally had a great deal of information and a great many opinions upon almost every subject you care to mention, which he was eager to communicate to a lovely woman of nineteen - all of which, he thought, she could not fail but to find quite enthralling. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| af2833e | To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment | Susanna Clarke | ||
| d9ed510 | Strange bent over these things, with a concentration to rival Minervois's own, questioning, criticizing and proposing. Strange and the two engravers spoke French to each other. To Strange's surprize Childermass understood perfectly and even addressed one or two questions to Minervois in his own language. Unfortunately, Childermass's French was so strongly accented by his native Yorkshire that Minervois did not understand and asked Strange i.. | humour languages | Susanna Clarke | |
| 0aed1ab | Thaumatomane: a person possessed of a passion for magic and wonders, Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| baaaf38 | the more apparatus a magician carries about with him -- coloured powders, stuffed cats, magical hats and so forth -- the greater the fraud you will eventually discover him to be! | Susanna Clarke | ||
| f7cdc56 | Oh," said the Duke of Wellington, not much interested, "they are still complaining about that, are they?" | Susanna Clarke | ||
| de28a54 | My dear Lascelles," cried Drawlight, "what nonsense you talk! Upon my word, there is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure - it is, after all, what every body does all the time." | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 18e160f | They were gentleman-magicians, which is to say they had never harmed any one by magic - nor ever done any one the slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon any one's head. But, with this one minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 7fd411a | The President of the York society (whose name was Dr Foxcastle) turned to John Segundus and explained that the question was a wrong one. "It presupposes that magicians have some sort of duty to do magic - which is clearly nonsense. You would not, I imagine, suggest that it is the task of botanists to devise more flowers? Or that astronomers should labour to rearrange the stars? Magicians, Mr Segundus, study magic which was done long ago. Wh.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 99705a9 | Whoever heard of cats doing anything useful!" "Except for staring at one in a supercilious manner," said Strange. "That has a sort of moral usefulness, I suppose, in making one feel uncomfortable and encouraging sober reflection upon one's imperfections." | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 91e5f12 | Then Childermass related to Mr Norrell what he had discovered about Drawlight: how he belonged to a certain breed of gentlemen, only to be met with in London, whose main occupation is the wearing of expensive and fashionable clothes; how they pass their lives in ostentatious idleness, gambling and drinking to excess and spending months at a time in Brighton and other fashionable watering places; how in recent years this breed seemed to have.. | drawlight | Susanna Clarke | |
| 00f002a | No, indeed!" she cried, all indignation. "I have no notion of asking people to perform services for me which I can do perfectly well for myself. I do not intend to go, in the space of one hour, from the helplessness of enchantment to another sort of helplessness!" pg. 761" | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 6ffa402 | Oh, Mr Norrell! Such a noodle I am upon occasion! | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 17a6c0e | What do you mean by yuanfen?" She thought for a minute and replied, "It means: that apportionment of love which is destined for you in this world." | fate love | Lan Samantha Chang | |
| de84f61 | The inner Min starved; she woke in the middle of the night, then lay for hours wondering what was wrong. | Lan Samantha Chang | ||
| a5909ee | For each of us, he understood, is born into our own time and eventually the things we held as the center of our world, dearly, unforgivingly, must fade. | Lan Samantha Chang | ||
| c73ce85 | For it is through humility, he knew, that holiness--and poetry--find entrance to the human soul. | Lan Samantha Chang | ||
| 13ed326 | Have you ever noticed?--people, no matter how beautiful or desirable, invariably will, if observed closely while going about their daily business of keeping alive, begin to seem like monsters. | Donald Antrim | ||
| a77ad20 | The problems in describing a person are essentially problems of knowing a person. | Donald Antrim | ||
| e2cbc05 | I buried her like a pagan. I put deer bones in with her, for her journey; a blanket, for warmth; flowers, cedar fronds, stones from places we'd been, grouse feathers, a tidbit of raw venison hamburger, and a swatch of my own hair. A headstone, a footstone. I planted an aspen tree above the headstone, to give her shade, and to someday provide leaf-music in the breeze. It took a long time before I was worth a damn again. How to measure the el.. | Rick Bass | ||
| eee2a38 | is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one? | Rick Bass | ||
| 2ab8674 | Sometimes I imagine I can feel the earth pause in its rotation, can feel it pause and look at us as if wondering, Just who the hell do you think you are? | the-universe | Rick Bass | |
| 1bbfd07 | You can't manufacture love: you can't build it back up, like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then you hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters, and the assaults of time. | Rick Bass | ||
| 18994e4 | I'm surprised when I walk right into yet another abandoned hunters' camp. Tattered plastic sheeting still hangs askew here and there. Blackened aerosol cans of Cheez Whiz sit in the fire pit, which sits in the middle of the trail. Assorted Styro-ware. Rotten leather boots. Where are these people? Are they back in civilization now, appearing to all observers to be as normal as pie, but inwardly ticking like time bombs and spreading their hot.. | litter trash | Rick Bass | |
| bcdd644 | When the longhorns could be gathered up and driven, it was theorized that the heat from the herd's mass attracted lightning. (Such was the radiant heat from a large herd that a cowboy's face would be blistered on whichever side of the herd he'd ridden by the day's end.) Their great horns also seemed to attract electricity, so that lightning and ground-electricity would bounce around from horn to horn throughout the herd - a phantasmagoric b.. | cowboys longhorns | Rick Bass | |
| 24e5041 | I think the idea of holing up and hunkering down against the larger forces of the world has not lost its allure since Thoreau's time. If anything that instinct, or impulse, continues to reside in almost all of us, sometimes activated or bestirred and other times dormant but always present. | Rick Bass | ||
| 5244ea2 | I've tried listening to one of those birding tapes but have had difficulty pretending I'm in the woods--no matter how accurately the calls are recorded, I have trouble making myself believe it's a real bird making that call when there is no other accompanying stimuli of the natural world: no odor of marsh or spruce, no slant of sunlight or dimming of dusk; no breeze, no grass rustle, no sky, no earth, and I have to confess also to becoming .. | Rick Bass | ||
| f758d1e | He read and reread 'Ulysses'. He looked back at Amy. They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said. | Richard Flanagan |