Quotes About Magic

Even a magician must have relations

But according to the Essay on the Extraordinary Revival of English Magic we have no business even to wonder about such things. According to Mr NORRELL and Lord PORTISHEAD the Modern Magician ought not to meddle with things only half-understood. But I say that it is precisely because these things are only half-understood that we must study them.

Oh, quite!" agreed Byron. "I was with him again a few hours ago and could not get him to talk of any thing but his dead wife and how she is not really dead, but merely enchanted. And now he shrouds himself in Darkness and works Black Magic! There is something rather admirable in all this, do you not agree?

There was a tall, sensible man in the room called Thorpe, a gentleman with very little magical learning, but a degree of common sense rare in a magician. He

Sir Doctor, we esteem very much the Hexenmeister of the Great Vellinton.

Yet within Mr Norrell's dry little heart there was as lively an ambition to bring back magic to England as would satisfied even Mr Honeyfoot, and it was with the intention of bring that ambition to a long-postponed fulfilment that Mr Norrell now proposed to go to London.

In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.

It seemed that it was not only live magicians which Mr. Norrell despised. He had taken the measure of all the dead ones too and found them wanting.

I suppose a magician might," he admitted, "but a gentleman never could.

I do not intend to go, in the space of one hour, from the helplessness of enchantment to another sort of helplessness!

But if you are going to take up a profession – and I cannot see why you should want one at all, now that you have come into your property – surely you can chuse something better than magic! It has no practical application.

The brown fields were partly flooded; they were strung with chains of chill, grey pools. The pattern of the pools had meaning. The pools had been written on to the fields by the rain. The pools were a magic worked by the rain, just as the tumbling of the black birds against the grey was a spell that the sky was working and the motion of grey-brown grasses was a spell that the wind made. Everything had meaning.

Books and papers are the basis of good scholarship and sound knowledge," declared Mr Norrell primly. "Magic is to be put on the same footing as the other disciplines.

If magic does not have friends in Yorkshire where may we find them?

Several people seized Strange bodily. One man started shaking him vigorously, as though he thought that he might in this way dispel any magic before it took effect.

There are books about magic and there are books of magic, and the price of the latter is far above rubies.

would not, I imagine, suggest that it is the task of botanists to devise more flowers? Or that astronomers should labour to rearrange the stars? Magicians, Mr Segundus, study magic which was done long ago. Why should any one expect more?" An elderly gentleman with faint blue eyes and

He wished he had never come to London. He wished he had never undertaken to revive English magic. He wished he had stayed at Hurtfew Abbey, reading and doing magic for his own pleasure. None of it, he thought, was worth the loss of forty books.

La magia no es respetable, caballero. No es... —buscó la palabra— seria. El gobierno no puede involucrarse en esas cosas.

Both had indulged in, if not Black Magic, then certainly magic of a darker hue than seemed desirable or legitimate.

Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics – in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.

In May 1976 Arne-Sayles wrote a letter to the director of the museum, asking to borrow the head so that he could perform a magical rite of his own invention, transfer the seer's knowledge to himself and so usher in a New Age for Mankind. To Arne-Sayles's astonishment, the director refused.

Once, men and women were able to turn themselves into eagles and fly immense distances. They communed with rivers and mountains and received wisdom from them. They felt the turning of the stars inside their own minds. My contemporaries did not understand this. They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology!

You are the closest I will ever come to magic.