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Quotes About Magic

Y así, al haber encontrado todo, supe que lo había perdido. Y supe que yo no volvería nunca más, y que la magia perdida no volvería nunca.
~ Thomas Wolfe
And he knew that he would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again. Lost now was all of it - the street, the heat, King's Highway, and Tom the Piper's son, all mixed in with the vast and drowsy murmur of the Fair, and with the sense of absence in the afternoon, and the house that waited, and the child that dreamed.
~ Thomas Wolfe
And as he stood there with Margaret quietly by his side the old and tragic light of fading day shone faintly on their faces, and all at once it seemed to him that they were fixed there like a prophecy with the hills and river all around them, and that there was something lost, intolerable, foretold and come to pass, something like old time and destiny—some magic that he could not say.
~ Thomas Wolfe
The moonlight fell upon the earth like a magic unearthly dawn. It wiped away all rawness, it hid all sores. It gave all common and familiar things--the sagging drift of the barn, the raw shed of the creamery, the rich curve of the lawyer's crabapple trees--a uniform bloom of wonder.
~ Thomas Wolfe
He groped for the doorless land of faery, that illimitable haunted country that opened somewhere below a leaf or a stone.
~ Thomas Wolfe
Politics was manipulation. Like a magic show.
~ Tim O'Brien
but he just slipped the pantyhose over his nose and breathed deep and let the magic do its work. It turned us into a platoon of believers. You don't dispute facts. But then, near the end of October, his girlfriend dumped him. It was a hard blow. Dobbins went quiet for a while, staring down at her letter, then after a time he took out the stockings and tied them around his neck as a comforter. 'No sweat,' he said. 'The magic doesn't go away.
~ Tim O'Brien
The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To push into the unknown in pursuit of still other unknowns. To reach into one's heart, down into that place where the stories are, bringing up the mystery of oneself.
~ Tim O'Brien
Jacky couldn't help barking out one syllable of a laugh. "Not noddle, dottle. The ash from a clay pipe of his." She pointed at the glass vial. "Ceneromancy, it's called. Magic you do with ashes. It's kept him near me, since…since he was killed.
~ Tim Powers
Oh hell, Vader, beer is old fashioned, salt is old fashioned. Why do you think magic spells in stories always rhyme? And kids' jump-rope rituals? And political slogans? The subconscious, the pre-rational part of your brain, thinks a statement must be important if it rhymes. And meter, that drum-beat—imagine how uninspiring the St. Crispin's Day speech in Henry V would have been if it wasn't in iambic pentameter!
~ Tim Powers
Duffy watched the wooden chest bobbing slowly away downstream. "Noon?" he repeated absently. "What's so special about noon?" Aurelianus tried standing up again, and made it this time. "All these magics involve a breaking or violation of the natural laws," he told Duffy, "and those laws relax just a little, are weakest, at noon and midnight.
~ Tim Powers
A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
~ Timothy Zahn
To create anything… is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.
~ Tom Bissell
To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.
~ Tom Bissell
THERE IS NO such thing as magic. That was merely the word people used to explain something so cleverly done that there was no ready explanation for it, and the simplest technique employed by its practitioners was to distract the audience with one moving and obvious hand (usually in a white glove) while the other was doing something else.
~ Tom Clancy
Hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown, you'll find out you're blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means. Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.
~ Tom Robbins
Magic things are fond of deceptions.
~ Tom Robbins
White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.
~ Tom Robbins
Science gives man what he needs. But magic gives him what he wants.
~ Tom Robbins
The longer Ellen Cherry thought about it, the more convinced she became that the mission of the artist in an overtechnologized, overmasculinized society was to call the old magic back to life. Could it be done? Yeah, you pessimistic wimps, it could. Could she do it? Probably not, but she could give it a whirl.
~ Tom Robbins
Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES.
~ Tom Robbins
Both money and art powdered as they are with the romance and poetry of the age are magic. Rather money is magic art is magik. Money is stagecraft slight of hand a bag of clever tricks. Art is a plexus of forces and influences that act upon the senses by means of practical yet permanently inexplicable secret links. Admittedly the line between the two can be as thin as a dime.
~ Tom Robbins
Birth, copulation, and death. Fine. In truth, however, there were at least two other things in which Amanda strongly believed. Namely: magic and freedom.
~ Tom Robbins
Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
~ Tom Robbins