Quotes about magic

Once magic was real everything else just seemed so unreal.

“Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic,” Fogg said expansively. “It doesn’t really make sense. It’s a little too perfect, don’t you think? If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.

“Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking: that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.”

“All magic means is a line between knowledge and ignorance,” Ortega responded. “A magician is someone who can do something you don’t know how to do. All technology, for example, is magic to a primitive.”

All things are known, but most things are forgotten. It takes a special magic to remember them.

Magic wasn't difficult. That was the big secret that the whole baroque edifice of wizardry had been set up to conceal. Anyone with a bit of intelligence and a bit of perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business. (pp. 178-179)

Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory.

“I’m a magician, I am,” he said. “I can see things that are really there.”

“There’s paperwork for magic? asked Vanessa.

“Not so glamorous now, eh?” I said.

Not everything that’s unexplained is caused by magic.

Low sample size—one of the reasons why magic and science are hard to reconcile.

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

Of course, where magic is involved, appearances don’t mean much.