Where in the world have you been? demanded Strange. Walking, she said. Her voice was just as it had always been. Walking! Arabella, are you quite mad? In three feet of snow? Where? In the dark woods,...
The brown fields were partly flooded; they were strung with chains of chill, grey pools. The pattern of the pools had meaning. The pools had been written on to the fields by the rain. The pools were a...
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...
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 co...
Mr Norrell determined to establish himself in London with all possible haste. You must get a house, Childermass, he said. Get me a house that says to those that visit it that magic is a respectable pr...
The old King is dead. The new King approaches! And at his approach the world sheds its sorrow. The sings of the old King dissolve like morning mist! The world assumes the character of the new. His vir...
Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people.
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 for the present Ministry, the F...
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 offen...
Where have they gone? Wherever magicians used to go. Behind the sky. On the other side of the rain.
Nothing, I believe, inspires a man with such eagerness to begin his day’s work as the sight of his instruments neatly laid out
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 pecu...
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 n...
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...
Magic, madam, is like wine and, if you are not used to it, it will make you drunk.
It would need someone very remarkable to recover your name, Stephen, someone of rare perspicacity, with extraordinary talents and incomparable nobility of character. Me, in fact.
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...
One day, he said,I shall find the right spell and banish the Darkness And on that day I will come to you.
Richard Chaston (1620–95). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the oth...
Mr Norrell was delighted. He did not believe that anyone had ever proposed such a piece of magic before and begged Sir Walter to convey his compliments to Lord Castlereagh as the possessor of a most o...
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