Quotes About Magic

For this was Christmas, which had always been a time of magic, to him and to all the world. This was a brightness, a shining festival, and while its enchantment was on the world the charmed circle of his family and home would be protected against any invasion from outside.

Susan Cooper

water was the one element that could in some measure defy all magic; for moving water would tolerate no magic whether for evil or good, but would wash it away as if it had never been made.

Unfortunately, there is no magic key. The misogynist's outbursts as well as his tenderness generally have little to do with how his partner is behaving. He is driven by his own inner demons. Therefore, there is no way to guarantee his good moods or eliminate his angry ones.

We have a friend, and Anglophile American city-dweller in his eighties, whose main ambition, now, is to hear a cuckoo call, for he never has, and perhaps he never will, for he is rather deaf. But, if he came and sat under the magic apple tree for an afternoon in May, it would be quiet enough, and then he might listen to the cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo until he had his fill.

There's magic in loving someone. It's like a part of the universe changes every time we open our heart.

Winemaking should be a mystery with a hint of magic.

La foto del amante escondida en la billetera de una mujer casada, el cartel fotográfico de una estrella de rock fijado sobre la cama de una adolescente, el retrato de propaganda del político prendido a la solapa del votante, las instantáneas de los hijos del taxista en la visera: todos los usos talismánicos de las fotografías expresan una actitud sentimental e implícitamente mágica; son tentativas de alcanzar o apropiarse de otra realidad.

La más antigua experiencia del arte tiene que haberlo percibido como encantamiento o magia; el arte era un instrumento del ritual (las pinturas de las cuevas de Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etcétera). La primera teoría del arte, la de los filósofos griegos, proponía que el arte era mímesis, imitación de la realidad.

The lover's photograph hidden in a married woman's wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent's bed, the campaign-button image of a politician's face pinned on a voter's coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver's children clipped to the visor--all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.

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.

When she was very small, her mother used to tell her that books were alive in a special way. Between the covers, characters were living their lives, enacting their dramas, falling in and out of love, finding trouble, working out their problems. Even sitting closed on a shelf, a book had a life of its own. When someone opened the book, that was when the magic happened.

I've always believed there's something magical about a book. A bundle of paper and ink that can change your life.

Do you feel the magic?" "Aye," he breathed into her salt-dusted hair. "It's all around me, but most especially, here in my arms.

The business is in trouble again because of the modern world. People are watching nonsense on their phones and ordering books online. If that keeps up, places like this might cease to exist. Apparently, he did have some understanding of the difficulties her mother had been having. Dorothy's face drained of color. No, she said. Bookstores are magic.

Between the covers, characters were living their lives, enacting their dramas, falling in and out of love, finding trouble, working out their problems. Even sitting closed on a shelf, a book had a life of its own. When someone opened the book, that was when the magic happened.

You cannot make a man love me any more than you can keep a flower from turning its face to the sun. Nature has endowed us with certain urges. That's why we speak of the magic of love.

Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people.

It is curious and we magicians collect curiosities, you know.

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

Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.

People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else.' Laurence Arne-Sayles, interview in The Secret Garden, May 1976

To a magician there is very little difference between a mirror and a door.

Where have they gone? Wherever magicians used to go. Behind the sky. On the other side of the rain.