Quotes from Christine Wicker

It's often the outcasts, the iconoclasts, the hyper-religious, the young people, sometimes middle-aged women, those who have the least to lose because they don't have much in the first place, who feel the new currents and ride them the farthest.

Tied to the physical, deaf to the eternal, riveted by my own shortcomings, I was thinking only of what a bad choice I'd made when choosing a partner for a chat. This guy was faking timidity to lure someone over. If I said victim, he was likely to start gnawing my neck. If I said vampire, he would demand proof. I hadn't the fangs enough to back that pretension.

So come Cinderella, let me take you to the ball again. Perhaps you will see more than I did, or perhaps you will begin to understand how difficult it is to understand. Truth is never easily wrested from the stuff of life, and this stuff was even stranger and sometimes more repellent than the usual fare.

They're power-hungry, the mundane said of the magical people. They're immoral, people said, and they're scary. Playing with the dark arts could plunge me into evil. I'd be pulled toward depravity. Blasphemy would begin to seem like truth, bad like good, God like Satan. It had happened to people through the centuries, they said. And they were right. All that did happen.

She wants him to become enchanted, to enter so deeply into her distress that his view of the world is changed and the insult of easy answers is no longer possible. Enchantment always causes complications. He is wise to resist, as she is equally wise to press for a true connection and nothing less.

They wear shorts, although many are long past the age and weight when they ought to have given up such revealing wear

Elaine said I could stop worrying about how my work was going to turn out.

All is in divine order.

In 1776, only 22 percent of the colonists in Massachusetts were Puritans, and even the Puritans practiced magic. "Colonial Americans were, in fact, more likely to turn to magical or occult techniques in their effort to avail themselves of superhuman power than they were to Christian rituals or prayer

Church membership at the start of the Revolution was 17 percent, a figure so low that some scholars suggest that schoolroom pictures of early American Puritans going to church ought to be joined by paintings of drunken revelers.

I meant no offense, but sometimes being a reporter and being offensive can't be pulled apart, no matter how politely you phrase the question.