"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."
— Roald Dahl

"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business."
— Tom Robbins

"You know, Minister, I disagree with Dumbledore on many counts...but you cannot deny he's got style..."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

"When two people meet and fall in love, there's a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it's usually too late, we've used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It's hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay."
— Tom Robbins

"Magic
Sandra’s seen a leprechaun,
Eddie touched a troll,
Laurie danced with witches once,
Charlie found some goblins gold.
Donald heard a mermaid sing,
Susy spied an elf,
But all the magic I have known
I've had to make myself.
"
— Shel Silverstein

"Apparently wizards poke their noses everywhere!"
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

"No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith."
— R.A. Salvatore (Streams of Silver)

"FABLEHAVEN: None who enter will leave unchanged. Trespassers will be turned to stone."
— Brandon Mull

"Magic can be found in stolen moments."
— Francesca Lia Block

"Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten."
— Terry Pratchett (Mort)

"The big difference between my mom and me-- besides the fact that she is dead normal and I'm a magic-handling freak-- is that she's the real thing. She may have a slight problem seeing other people's points of view, but she's honest about it. She's a brass-bound bitch because she believes she knows best. I'm a brass-bound bitch because I don't want anyone getting close enough to find out what a whiny little knot of naked nerve endings I really am. "
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited)

"Invitation
If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hope-er a pray-er, a magic bean buy-er
If you’re a pretender come sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!
"
— shel silverstien*

"And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.
What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world."
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin)

"And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
— C.S. Lewis (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

"It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful. Other men may be in raptures at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or a dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it. But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself."
— Susanna Clarke

"To Fred, those years seemed to pass like quickly skimming a book and then finding the ending wasn't what he expected. He wished he'd paid more attention to the story."
— Sarah Addison Allen

"That's the thing about magic; you've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you."
— Charles de Lint

"Feeling at peace, however fragilely, made it easy to slip into the visionary end of the dark-sight. The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose. "
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"I do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of syncronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone."
— Charles de Lint

"Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness."
— Aleister Crowley

"What is magic?
There is the wizard's explanation... wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes and the importance of having at least four good meals every day."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it."
— Gregory Maguire (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister)

"hark, now hear the sailors cry,
smell the sea, and feel the sky
let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic..."
— Van Morrison

"If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force."
— Antonin Artaud (The Theater and Its Double)

"To my mind, ‘magic’ is the hard-to-define quality of the things that stir up mystical feelings like amazement, curiosity, imagination, and above all wonder.

Magic is that which renders something beautiful in a spiritual sense. It is that which makes one feel as if the world is more than it is presently understood to be, and yet at the same time the world is working itself out in a good and beautiful way.

Magic underlies the relationship between us, and the greater immensities of birth and death. Thus the experience of being in the presence of something magical is an empowering, uplifting experience. Magic, understood this way, contributes meaning to life.
"
— Brendan Myers

"... perhaps the clock hands had become so tired of going in the same direction year after year that they had suddenly begun to go the opposite way instead..."
— Jostein Gaarder (The Christmas Mystery)

"and I shall watch the ferry boats, and they'll get high, on a bluer ocean against tomorrow's sky. and i will never grow so old again, and i will walk and talk, in gardens all wet with rain..."
— Van Morrison

"Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name."
— Leonora Carrington (The Hearing Trumpet)

"Aureliano Segundo was deep in the reading of a book. Although it had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere, the boy enjoyed the story of a woman who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice, which she picked up with a pin, and the story of the fisherman who borrowed a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a fish in payment later it had a diamond in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying carpets. Surprised, he asked Ursula if all that was true and she answered him that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to Macondo.
"What's happening," she sighed, "is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don't come here any more."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."
— Aldous Huxley

"Despite all my public misconduct, in the past year, I had learned the Elemental spells, the Doppelschläferin, and the preparation and flying of a magic broom; I had survived two months as prisoner of war, saving the life of captain Johanne in the process; I had escaped the dungeons of Fortress Drachensbett, and after an arduous journey successfully reunited with my double, so preserving her, and all Montagne, from Prince Flonian's rapacity, I would somehow master the despicable art of being a princess."
— Catherine Gilbert Murdock (Princess Ben: Being a Wholly Truthful Account of Her Various Discoveries and Misadventures, Recounted to the Best of Her Recollection, in Four Parts)

"She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four."
— Gloria Naylor (Mama Day)

"Then it is not uncommon for a man to become lost in a single letter, or hear a voice rise up from the silent page."
— Howard Schwartz

"Those who spell Magic with a K aren't."
— Anton Szandor LaVey

"If a night-moth were to concentrate its will on flying to a star or some equally unattainable object, it wouldn't succeed. Only, it wouldn't even try in the first place. A moth confines its search to what has sense and value for it, what it needs, what is indispensable to its life... if I imagined that I wanted under all circumstances to get to the North Pole, then to achieve it I would have to desire it strongly enough that my whole being was ruled by it. But if I were to decide to will that the pastor should stop wearing his glasses, it would be useless. That would be making a game of it."
— Hermann Hesse

"The sun is happy when you wear a dunce cap and turn random spotted animals into hexagons. But if you don't wear a dunce cap, the sun will be so annoyed it will set early."
— Chandra

"The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place."
— Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)

"White magic or black, it doesn’t make a difference. Natural and artificial? Obsolete distinctions"
— David Porush

"Repetition opens doors, you know?"
— Tim Lucas (The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula)