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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5de7871 | Sir Doctor, we esteem very much the Hexenmeister of the Great Vellinton. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 96ff3f6 | David was the son of a famous Venetian rabbi. From his youth he had been accustomed to debate good principles and right conduct with all sorts of grave Jewish persons. These conversations had formed his own character and he naturally supposed that a small measure of the same could not help but improve other people's. In short he had come to believe that if only one talks long enough and expresses oneself properly, it is perfectly possible t.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 8fba30a | The first dinner-party of a bride's career is a momentous occasion, entailing a world of small anxieties. The accomplishments which have won her acclaim in the three years since she left the schoolroom are no longer enough. It is no longer enough to dress exquisitely, to chuse jewels exactly appropriate to the situation, to converse in French, to play the pianoforte and sing. Now she must turn her attention to French cooking and French wine.. | dinner-party mothers-and-daughters | Susanna Clarke | |
| ff3b7bd | Mr Murray was sorry to find that his two authors could not agree better, but he reflected that it probably could not be helped since both men were famous for quarrelling: Strange with Norrell, and Byron with practically everybody.3 When | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 846a70e | Books and papers are the basis of good scholarship and sound knowledge," declared Mr Norrell primly. "Magic is to be put on the same footing as the other disciplines." | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 13e6fcd | In person he was rather tall and his figure was considered good. Some people thought him handsome, but this was not by any means the universal opinion. His face had two faults: a long nose and an ironic expression. It is also true that his hair had a reddish tinge and, as everybody knows, no one with red hair can ever truly be said to be handsome. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| e3bcdc9 | Rodney Crowell says. "I went over, and we sat at the table, and Guy had a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, a quart, and he was hurting. He was drinking whiskey. When the pain is so deep, it's that moan, it's that timeless moan, and pain. Susanna was--that conversation was, 'You know, it's over.' She was just saying, 'It's over.' Guy was just trying to deal with the pain. Susanna surrendered something that night, as far as I could tell." Her" | Tamara Saviano | ||
| 840a277 | He wished he had never come to London. He wished he had never undertaken to revive English magic. He wished he had stayed at Hurtfew Abbey, reading and doing magic for his own pleasure. None of it, he thought, was worth the loss of forty books. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| e4835d7 | Still the strange ships glittered and shone, and this led to some discussion as to what they might be made of. The Admiral thought perhaps iron or steel. (Metal ships indeed! The French are, as I have often supposed, a very whimsical nation.) | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 88fc774 | and a couple of days later he sent Strange a haggis (a sort of Scotch pudding) as a present. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| ff1184a | It is also true that his hair had a reddish tinge and, as everybody knows, no one with red hair can ever truly be said to be handsome. At | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 87f04ea | Why do pretty women always have such herds of relatives? | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 12e78e3 | The gentlemen among my readers will smile to themselves and say that women never did understand business, but the ladies may agree with me that Mrs Brandy understood her business very well, for the chief business of Mrs Brandy's life was to make Stephen Black as much in love with her as she was with him. In | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 2ec27ec | In a war one is either living like a prince or a vagabond. I | Susanna Clarke | ||
| bf13c51 | And her looks? Is she pretty?" asked Strange. The question seemed to embarrass Henry. "Miss Watkins is not generally considered one of the first in beauty, no. But then upon further acquaintance, you know - that is worth a great deal. People of both sexes, whose looks are very indifferent at the beginning, may appear almost handsome on further acquaintance. A well-informed mind, nice manners and a gentle nature - all of these are much more .. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 2ed80fc | The first ten books Mr. Segundus looked at were worthless -- books of sermons and moralizing from the last century, or descriptions of persons whom no one living cared about. The next fifty were very much the same. He began to think his task would soon be done. But then he stumbled upon some very interesting and unusual works of geology, philosophy and medicine. He began to feel more sanguine. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| ef43517 | It is possible, of course," he said, "to imprison someone within the pattern of a carpet for a thousand years or so. That is a particularly horrible fate which I always reserve for people who have offended me deeply - as have these magicians! The endless repetition of colour and pattern - not to mention the irritation of the dust and the humiliation of stains - never fails to render the prisoner completely mad! The prisoner always emerges f.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 842ff00 | it sometimes happens that when one acts quickly and with great resolve, all the indecisiveness and doubt comes afterwards, when it is too late. So | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 635101e | But it is the same with all of us. 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 | ||
| 578d6d5 | Oh, quite!" agreed Byron. "I was with him again a few hours ago and could not get him to talk of any thing but his dead wife and how she is not really dead, but merely enchanted. And now he shrouds himself in Darkness and works Black Magic! There is something rather admirable in all this, do you not agree?" | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 2dd868f | For the next hour and a half he tried all the magic he could think of. He cast spells of remembering, spells of finding, spells of awakening, spells to concentrate the mind, spells to dispel nightmares and evil thoughts, spells to find patterns in chaos, spells to find a path when one was lost, spells of demystification, spells of discernment, spells to increase intelligence, spells to cure sickness and spells to repair a limb that is shatt.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| f24d258 | But though he had no striking vices, his virtues were perhaps almost as hard to define. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| d9756aa | Every man and woman present thought how the neatly drawn lines and words upon the maps were in truth ice-covered pools and rivers, silent woods, frozen ditches and high, bare hills and every one of them thought how many sheep and cattle and wild creatures died in this season. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 217feae | Childermass laughed. "You are right, Vinculus. You are not like the others. That is my life - there on the table. But you cannot read it. You are a strange creature - the very reverse of all the magicians of the last centuries. They were full of learning but had no talent. You have talent and no knowledge. You cannot profit by what you see." | Susanna Clarke | ||
| b8bc0d2 | But these people were judged very stupid by their friends. Was not Jonathan Strange known to be precisely the sort of whimsical, contradictory person who would publish against himself? | christianity community faith family god godly honor obstacles vows word world | Susanna Clarke | |
| f1867b9 | Though all the houses of Venice are strange and old, those of the Ghetto seemed particularly so - as if queerness and ancientness were two of the commodities this mercantile people dealt in and they had constructed their houses out of them. Though all the streets of Venice are melancholy, these streets had a melancholy that was quite distinct - as if Jewish sadness and Gentile sadness were made up according to different recipes. Yet | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 59aaa62 | Ah, but, sir," said Lascelles, "it is precisely by passing judgements upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does." | Susanna Clarke | ||
| fb8d71a | They were excessively pleased with the Campo Santa Maria Formosa. They thought the facades of the houses very magnificent - they could not praise them highly enough. But the sad decay, which buildings, bridges and church all displayed, seemed to charm them even more. They were Englishmen and, to them, the decline of other nations was the most natural thing in the world. They belonged to a race blessed with so sensitive an appreciation of it.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 37e6604 | but he had the natural distrust that a young, rich, self-indulgent man feels for members of the clergy. Who could say what notions of extraordinary virtue and unnecessary self-sacrifice they might be daily imparting to her? | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 04f0dd6 | Once, adj. Enough. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| 7df5a54 | Opportunity, n. A favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| 4584773 | whereas malice was the beginning and end of Laurence Strange's character, the new manservant was a more natural blend of light and shade. He possessed a great deal of good sense and was as energetic in defending others from real injury as he was in revenging imaginary insults to himself. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| fba29f0 | Good God! It is very nonsensical for us all to sit here and assert that Norrell can or cannot do this or can or cannot do that. We are all rational beings I think, and the answer, surely, is quite simple - we will ask him to do some magic for us in proof of his claims." This was such good sense that for a moment the magicians were silent - though this is not to say that the proposal was universally popular - not at all. Several of the magic.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| f65082d | She did not rise at their entrance, nor make any sign that she had noticed them at all. But perhaps she did not hear them. For, though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 6887f2e | Ha quem prefira atribuir sua falta de exito a uma falha do mundo em vez de ao conhecimento mediano que tenha. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 63db3ca | Palavra de honra, nao existe nada no mundo tao facil de explicar como o fracasso... E, afinal de contas, o que todo mundo alcanca o tempo inteiro. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 7951cda | O desanimo, Mister Black, e o pior tormento de que um homem pode sofrer. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 91ac959 | Um sistema moral que pune a mulher e isenta o homem de toda a culpa me parece assaz execravel. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| aaaa8a8 | And she was quite tolerable to look at, you say?" said Mr Lascelles. "You never saw her?" said Drawlight. "Oh! she was a heavenly creature. Quite divine. An angel." "Indeed? And such a pinched-looking ruin of a thing now! I shall advise all the good-looking women of my acquaintance not to die," said Mr Lascelles." | Susanna Clarke | ||
| f9e5f1c | No matter how low the Government stood in the estimation of everyone, when the Foreign Secretary stood up and spoke - ah! how different everything seemed then! How quickly was every bad thing discovered to be the fault of the previous administration (an evil set of men who wedded general stupidity to wickedness of purpose). As | Susanna Clarke | ||
| c8c479a | 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. | funny magic magicians | Susanna Clarke | |
| 285d75f | The York magicians had all looked over the letter and expressed their doubts that any body with such small handwriting could ever make a tolerable magician. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| aa32c6b | Mr. Honeyfoot's post-chaise travelled through a world that seemed to contain a much higher proportion of chill grey sky and a much smaller one of solid comfortable earth than was usually the case. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 167c0ba | As [Norrell] watched she was seized by a fit of coughing that continued for some moments, and during that time Sir Walter appeared most uncomfortable. He did not look at the young woman (though he looked everywhere else in the room). He picked up a gilt ornament from a little table by his side, turned it over, looked at its underneath, put it down again. Finally he coughed -a brief clearing of the throat as though to suggest that everyone c.. | love | Susanna Clarke |