Adjacent to Halloween are these quotes about magic – currently from mining the goodreads category, but likely from other places as well. Some are simply for the words. Many are wildflowers. I thought they were pretty, but they may not fit with this particular scene/set.
As we noted before, Halloween is a time of sorcerous wonders. Why not have a few more words to describe it?
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl
“Magick is the science and art of causing change in conformity with Will.”
-Aleister Crowley
“I address you all tonight for who you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.”
― Brian Selznick, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret”
“Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that… there are many kinds of magic, after all.”
― Erin Morgenstern, “The Night Circus”
“The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you wont find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.”
― Christopher Priest, The Prestige
“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
“No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.”
― R.A. Salvatore, Streams of Silver
“There is darkness in light, there is pain in joy, and there are thorns on the rose.”
― Cate Tiernan
“Magic can be found in stolen moments.”
― Francesca Lia Block
“She heard him mutter, ‘Can you take away this grief?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
“That’s the thing about magic; you’ve got to know it’s still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.”
― Charles de Lint
“…something was starting to take shape, out of magic and will. Smoke and bone.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
“Some people are magic, and others are just the illusion of it.”
― Beau Taplin
“I have a little theory that I’d like to air here, if I may. What is it that you think makes you magicians?” More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical-question territory now anyway. He spoke more softly. “Is it because you are intelligent? Is it because you are brave and good? Is is because you’re special?
Maybe. Who knows. But I’ll tell you something: I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.
Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians
“But remember. Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
― Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
“To each his own magic.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing
“Magic comes from what is inside you. It is a part of you. You can’t weave together a spell that you don’t believe in.”
― Jim Butcher
“But all the magic I have known
I’ve had to make myself.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends
“This witch had been crafted from the darkness between the stars.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows
“There is a kind of magicness about going far away and then coming back all changed.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, New Chronicles of Rebecca\
“A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. ”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians
“It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
“There is a relationship between the eye contacts we make and the perceptions that we create in our heads, a relationship between the sound of another’s voice and the emotions that we feel in our hearts, a relationship between our movements in space all around us and the magnetic pulls we can create between others and ourselves. All of these things (and more) make up the magic of every ordinary day and if we are able to live in this magic, to feel and to dwell in it, we will find ourselves living with magic every day. These are the white spaces in life, the spaces in between the written lines, the cracks in which the sunlight filters into. Some of us swim in the overflowing of the wine glass of life, we stand and blink our eyes in the sunlight reaching unseen places, we know where to find the white spaces, we live in magic.”
― C. JoyBell C.
“The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
“I love you.” Why it worked right then, why the webbing of my godmother’s spell frayed as though the words had been an open flame, I don’t know. I haven’t found any explanation for it. There aren’t any magical words, really. The words just hold the magic. They give it a shape and a form, they make it useful, describe the images within. I’ll say this, though: Some words have a power that has nothing to do with supernatural forces. They resound in the heart and mind, they live long after the sounds of them have died away, they echo in the heart and the soul. They have power, and that power is very real. Those three words are good ones.”
― Jim Butcher, Grave Peril
“Love and magic have a great deal in common. they enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take practice.”
― Nora Roberts
“The tension between what is, and what we dream of, is important. Not to discount what we have, but to hold onto that middle ground, because it’s in there that the magic happens.”
― Susan Branch
“Magic is a matter of focusing the disciplined will. But sometimes the will must be abandoned. The secret lies in knowing when to exercise control, and when to let go.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lady of Avalon
“To my mind, ‘magic’ is the hard-to-define quality of the things that stir up mystical feelings like amazement, curiosity, imagination, and above all wonder.
Magic is that which renders something beautiful in a spiritual sense. It is that which makes one feel as if the world is more than it is presently understood to be, and yet at the same time the world is working itself out in a good and beautiful way.
Magic underlies the relationship between us, and the greater immensities of birth and death. Thus the experience of being in the presence of something magical is an empowering, uplifting experience. Magic, understood this way, contributes meaning to life. ”
― Brendan Myers
“It might have all the same; you never can tell what’s magic.”
― Noel Streatfeild, Ballet Shoes
“It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods
“Not only do we all have magic, it’s all around us as well. We just don’t pay attention to it. Every time we make something out of nothing, that’s an act of magic. It doesn’t matter if it’s a painting or a garden, or an abuelo telling his grandchildren some tall tale. Every time we fix something that’s broken, whether it’s a car engine or a broken heart, that’s an act of magic.
And what makes it magic is that we *choose* to create or help, just as we can choose to harm. But it’s so easy to destroy and so much harder to make things better. That’s why doing the right thing makes you stronger.
If we can only remember what we are and what we can do, nobody can bind us or control us.”
― Charles de Lint, The Mystery of Grace
“One cannot shape the world without being reshaped in the process. Each gain of power requires its own sacrifice.”
― Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic
“Mere words cannot defeat a true hero. Unless they happen to be the words to some sort of Instant Death Spell. Magic is scary.”
― Christopher Healy, The Hero’s Guide to Storming the Castle
“I believe that there is luminosity hiding in the shadow of the mundane. And things that hover at the periphery of our vision. If that’s magic, then I believe in it.”
― Natasha Mostert
“Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.”
― Marsilio Ficino
“No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
“There is no place so dangerous as a world without magic.”
― Terry Goodkind, Soul of the Fire
“If power is the only important thing, then Frodo loses against Sauron. Hell, if power’s the only important thing then Gandalf loses against Sauron. If magic is the deciding factor of a fight, then four plucky kids from England get their asses turned to stone by the White Which.”
― Patrick Rothfuss