At that age, Alice had grasped the idea that some things in books were real, and others were not. — Django Wexler

Magic, you’ll find, is nine parts dull to one part excitement, and the exciting bits usually hurt like the blazes.

“You’re a cat,” she said automatically.

“Your powers of perception are astounding,” the cat drawled. “Although I feel obliged to point out, in the interests of ontological exactitude, that I am in fact only half cat. Personally, though, I have always considered it the better half.”

But—though she was not an expert on cats—she was fairly certain that they did not, as a rule, snicker.