Quotes about magic

In general he doesn’t know any more about magic than an ostrich knows about icebergs.

It can’t be magic, Daphne thought. Magic is just a way of saying “I don’t know.”

Magic—that's just a label, you know. Completely meaningless. It wasn't so very long ago that people were saying that electricity was magic.

I am nothing but a scientist of sufficiently advanced technology, which is to say a magician.

It was funny about magic, how messy and imperfect it was. When people said something worked like magic they meant that it cost nothing and did exactly what you wanted it to. But there were lots of things magic couldn’t do. It couldn’t raise the dead. It couldn’t make you happy. He couldn’t make you good-looking. And even with the things it could do, it didn’t always do them right. And it always, always cost something.

That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny.

You know what Arthur C. Clarke said about technology and magic, right? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Turn it around. What is advanced magic indistinguishable from? Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from the miraculous.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

Where was the line between a spell and a miracle?

He threw his sword away. Screw swords. A magician doesn’t need a sword. A magician doesn’t need anything but what’s inside him.

To be honest, Quentin felt superior to anybody who still messed around with magic. They could delude themselves if they liked, those self-indulgent magical mandarins, but he’d outgrown that stuff. He wasn’t a magician anymore, he was a man, and a man took responsibility for his actions.

Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.