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.
The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
I am not unaware of the saying that more tears have been shed over wishes granted than wishes denied.
Every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.
Factual truth is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even if it occurs in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature.
A private relationship of worshiping God is the greatest essential element of spiritual fitness.
Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?
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