I have so many for this book (and if you haven't read it already, you'll see how very unique her style is!)
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"My dear Lascelles," cried Drawlight, "what nonsense you talk! Upon my word, there is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure - it is, after all, what every body does all the time."
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It has been remarked (by a lady infinitely cleverer than the present author) how kindly disposed the world in general feels to young people who either die or marry. Imagine then the interest that surrounded Miss Wintertowne! No young lady ever had such advantages before: for she died upon the Tuesday, was raised to life in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and was married upon the Thursday; which some people thought too much excitement for one week.
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A footnote explaining why Jonathan Strange's father did not keep the child from his mother's people:
Upon the contrary Laurence Strange congratulated himself on avoiding paying for the boy's food and clothes for months at a time. So may a love of money make an intelligent man small-minded and ridiculous.
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About Lady Pole and her butler, Stephen, both suffering under a fairy enchantment:
But perhaps it was not so curious. The different styles of life of a lady and a butler tend to obscure any similarities in their situations. A butler has his work and must do it. Unlike Lady Pole, Stephen was not suffered to sit idly by the window, hour after hour, without speaking. Symptoms that were raised to the dignity of an illness in Lady Pole were dismissed as mere low spirits in Stephen.
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Strange's vision of the army's future, on the eve of the carnage of Waterloo:
Men and horses began to disappear, few by few at first, and then more quickly - hundreds, thousands of them vanishing from sight. Great gaps appeared among the close-packed soldiers. A little further to the east, an entire regiment was gone, leaving a hole the size of Hanover-square. Where, moments before, all had been life, conversation and activity, there was now nothing but the rain and the twilight and the waiving stalks of rye.
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It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful. Other men may be in raptures at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or a dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it. But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.
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On cats:
For, though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.
"Such nonsense!" declared Dr. Greysteel. "Whoever heard of cats doing anything useful!"
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