That was his first introduction to the tertiary colours, the colours on the far side of blackness, the colours that you get if you split blackness with an eight-sided prism. They are also almost impossible to describe in a non-magical environment, but if someone were to try they’d probably start by telling you to smoke […]
The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them.
I think of all the complicated histories that landscapes have, and how easy it is to wipe them away, put easier, safer histories in their place.
Human hands are for holding other hands. Human hands are for holding other humans close.
Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace.
a key to the understanding of all religions is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs. Wyrd Sisters
Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own
Naturally he was eager to re-establish himself as Emperor, but it was not yet known where he would chuse to be Emperor of. Susanna Clarke – Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
County gentleman who read in their newspapers the speeches of this or that Minister would mutter to themselves that he was certainly a clever fellow. But the county gentlemen were not made comfortable by this thought. The country gentlemen had a strong suspicion that cleverness was somehow unBritish. That sort of restless, unpredictable brilliance belonged […]
Mr Norrell (who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them in books, but who had never actually been introduced to a joke or shaken its hand) Susanna Clarke – Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, pg 41
Women, therefore, had no input into a theology that gave so much importance to the male seed, and that led to a situation where masturbation or oral sex, performed between two consenting couples, was more serious than rape; rape at least preserved” the natural relationship between the sexes, whereas other activities “wasted” the seed altogether. […]
Fergus’s fertility was so renowned that his name itself has been translated as “male ejaculation son of super stallion”. His virility was such that seven fists fit in his penis and his scrotum was the size of a bushel bag. Condren, Mary. (1989) The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland […]