you must learn to live as I do - in the face of constant criticism, opposition and censure. That, sir, is the English way.

Time and I have quarrelled. All hours are midnight now. I had a clock and a watch, but I destroyed them both. I could not bear the way they mocked me.

Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never would.

I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.

I know magicians and I know magic and I say this: all magicians lie and this one more than most.

To be more precise it was the color of heartache.

It was an old fashioned house --the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.