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 ea...
A man as talented and handsome as yourself ought not be a servant! he said in a shocked tone. He ought to be the ruler of a vast estate! What is beauty for, I should like to know, if not to stand as a...
The argument he was conducting with his neighbor as to whether the English magician had gone mad because he was a magician, or because he was English.
When the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time th...
A cold, miserable little hamlet on the eastern coast of America called Piper’s Grave.
Well, surely, you will agree that a great improvement could be made simply by cutting down those trees that crowd about the house so much and darken every room? They grow just as they please – just wh...
Mr. Segundus began to suspect that they had an uneventful morning, and that when a strange gentleman had walked into the room and dropt down in a swoon, they were rather pleased than otherwise.
It was as if a door had opened somewhere. Or possibly a series of doors. There was a sensation as of a breeze blowing into the house and bringing with it the half-rememberedscents of childhood. There...
It is, after all, many centuries since clergymen distinguished themselves on the field of war, and lawyers never have.
Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who go...
He thought he stood upon an English hillside. Rain was falling; it twisted in the air like grey ghosts. Rain fell upon him and he grew thin as rain. Rainwashed away thought, washed away memory, all th...
Even a magician must have relations,
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 h...
Childermass was still there. He had taken his dinner at one of the tables and was now doing the household accounts. As Mr Norrell entered, he looked up and grinned. I believe Mr Strange will do very w...
But the veterans of the Peninsular War remarked approvingly that rain was always an Englishman’s friend in times of war. They told their comrades: There is nothing so comforting or familiar to us, you...
But that is not to say that there might not be someone in the world - I do not say I have seen him yet - whom I would be a little afraid to look at sometimes - for fear that he might be looking sad -...
Because, whenever I am melancholy you talk to me of cheerful things and cure my low spirits and so I must now do the same for you. That is what friendship is.
Alexander of Whitby taught that the universe is like a tapestry only parts of which are visible to us at a time. After we are dead, we will see the whole and then it will be clear to us how the differ...
An evil set of men who wedded general stupidity to wickedness of purpose).
With his long hair as ragged as rain and as black as thunder, he would have looked quite at home upon a windswept moor, or lurking in some pitch-black alleyway, or perhaps in a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe...