Magic Lessons: A Prequel to Practical Magic (The Practical Magic Series) (Volume 1)

by Alice Hoffman

Some love is like that; it only has room enough to fit two people, who can only see one another and include no one else.

After his illness he had come to understand time in a different way. It was not endless, as most young men believed it to be. There was so little of it he could hold it in his hands, and still it slipped away, even as he stood in the pale sunlight approaching Boston Harbor, beside a woman he didn’t wish to lose.

Tell a witch to go, and she’ll plant her feet on the ground and stay exactly where she is. Instead of doing as she’s told, she’ll take a knife to her arm and let her blood drip onto the ground, and in that way she will claim the earth for herself and for her daughters and for all the daughters who follow her. It is the future she’s claiming, the right to be a woman who can do as she pleases.

A woman alone who could read and write was suspect. Words were magic. Books were not to be trusted. What men could not understand, they wished to burn.

You never know what you want or need until you are old, for old age is a mystery that is impossible to unwind until you step into its maze.

She opened the windows so his spirit would be free once it left his body. We are birds, Hannah had once told her. They sit inside of us waiting to fly away.

What belonged to you once, will always belong to you. Be grateful if you have walked through the world with another’s heart in your hand.

she knew that a girl whose father doesn’t want her will be both stronger and weaker than she might have been had he ever loved her.