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 neighb...
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...
He smiles but rarely and watches other men to see when they laugh and then does the same.
Excess of grief may bring on quite as fine a bout of madness an an excess of any thing else. Truth to tell, I was not quite myself for a time. Truth to tell, I was a little wild.
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 a...
Above all remember this: that magic belongs as much to the heart as to the head and everything which is done, should be done from love or joy or righteous anger.
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,...
Where have they gone? Wherever magicians used to go. Behind the sky. On the other side of the rain.
What nobility of feeling! To sacrifice your own pleasure to preserve the comfort of others! It is a thing, I confess, that would never occur to me.
The war went from bad to worse and the Government was universally detested. As each fresh catastrophe came to the public’s notice some small share of blame might attach itself to this or that person,...
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...
She lived quite alone and whether the fault was hers or whether the fault was theirs I do not know. And a great deal of time went by and she did not speak to a living soul and a great wind of madness...
She had been a comet; and her blazing descent through dark skies had been plain for all to see.
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...
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...
Other countries have stories of kings who will return at times of greatneed. Only in England is it part of the constitution.
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...
Magic, madam, is like wine and, if you are not used to it, it will make you drunk.
John Longridge, the cook at Harley-street, had suffered from low spirits for more than thirty years, and he was quick to welcome Stephen as a newcomer to the freemasonry of melancholy.
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.