Susanna Clarke Quotes

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.

[Sex] is something big and cosmic. What else do we have? There's only birth and death and the union of two people - and sex is the only one that happens to us more than once.

Marriage can be viewed as the waiting room for death.

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

A wedding is a funeral where you smell your own flowers.

Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth: birth, marriage and death.

A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.

When Hillel died, it was during one of the happiest times of my life. I was married and completely in love and had a baby on the way.

Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table. That's how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose.

When I die, people will say it is the best thing for me. It is because they know it is the worst. They want to avoid the feeling of pity. As though they were the people most concerned!

You were born with your legs apart. They'll send you to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin.

Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage.

The three most important events of human life are equally devoid of reason: birth, marriage and death.

It's Annie and me they're all sitting around here like cardboard people judging; It's Annie and me. And what we did that they think is wrong, when you pare it all down, was fall in love.

The others were only my wives. But you, my dear, will be my widow.

I've seen of enough of people who die for an idea. I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learned it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

Nowadays most people wear black most of the time anyway: go to a literary party and one would imagine everyone there was in perpetual mourning for their lives.

I really have no idea where the darkness comes from. Other writers have said that there are two subjects worth writing about, love and death; and since I'm a complete flop when it comes to love, I chose death. Too, maybe because of where I came from, I do find it easy to empathise with and write about certain groups of damaged or downtrodden people: the poor, the addicted.

Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people are are ourselves loved by others. But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you.

People keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast.

Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?