Lorena

“He did not feel as if he were inside a Pillar of Darkness in the middle of Yorkshire; he felt more as if the rest of the world had fallen away and he and Strange were left alone upon a solitary island or promontory. The idea distressed him a great deal less than one might have supposed. He had never much cared for the world and he bore its loss philosophically.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“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.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“In fact, the fairies had turned him into a water-baby.
A water-baby?  You never heard of a water-baby.  Perhaps not.  That is the very reason why this story was written. 
(...)
"But there are no such things as water-babies."
How do you know that?  Have you been there to see?  And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were none.  If Mr. Garth does not find a fox in Eversley Wood—as folks sometimes fear he never will—that does not prove that there are no such things as foxes.  And as is Eversley Wood to all the woods in England, so are the waters we know to all the waters in the world.  And no one has a right to say that no water-babies exist, till they have seen no water-babies existing; which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water-babies; and a thing which nobody ever did, or perhaps ever will do.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale For a Land Baby

“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.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell