Amy Bird

“He was sick of the noise and sight of so many people and determined to go quietly away, but it so happened that just at that moment the crowds about the door were particularly impenetrable; he was caught up in the current of people and carried away to quite another part of the room. Round and round he went like a dry leaf caught up in a drain; in one of these turns around the room he discovered a quiet corner near a window. A tall screen of carved ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl half-hid - ah! what bliss was this! - a bookcase. Mr Norrell slipped behind the screen, took down John Npier's A Plaine Discouverie of the Whole Revelation of St John and began to read.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“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 profession - no less than Law and a great deal more so than Medicine."
Childermass inquired drily if Mr Norrell wished him to seek out architecture expressive of the proposition that magic was as respectable as the Church?
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) considered a while before replying at last that no, he did not think they could quite claim that.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“I'd better say at the start that I don't actually believe in magic any more than I believe in astrology, because I'm a Taurean and we don't go in for all that weirdo occult stuff.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-Fiction

“Rejection was to be rejection but not denial, as reception was to be reception but not subservience. Both methods, the Affirmative Way and the Negative Way, were to co-exist; one might almost say, to co-inhere, since each was to be the key of the other: in intellect as in emotion, in morals as in doctrine.”
― Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church