Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that both houses and people develop unique quirks and eccentricities over time, especially when left alone.
In this quote, Susanna Clarke anthropomorphizes a house, likening it to an old gentleman who has become eccentric due to solitude. The comparison illustrates how both people and their environments can take on characteristics shaped by their experiences, habits, and solitude, emphasizing the idea that places, like people, gain personality over time in their isolation.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about architecture and how buildings reflect their occupants.
But when the fairy sang the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift 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.
It is these black clothes," said Strange. "I am like a leftover piece of funeral, condemned to walk about the Town, frightening people into thinking of their own mortality.
She doesn't do the things heroines are supposed to. Which is rather Jane Austen's point - Fanny is her subversive heroine. She is gentle and self-doubting and utterly feminine; and given the right circumstances, she would defy an army.
I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually, this led to making up stories and writing things down.
All books are doors; and some of them are wardrobes.
But to my mind, though I am native here, And to the manner born, it is a custom, More honored in the breach than the observance.
It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.'
There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.
A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.
The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
I don't know. I don't know at all. And that's what's frightening the life out of me. To have no idea.
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