A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping Quotes

“Your magic knew exactly who you were. That’s why your spell was a shield, not a sword.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Theirs was a friendship built on the unspoken, shared understanding that you can love the home you’ve made with the whole of your heart and still know the land it’s built on will never claim you.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Spend a bit more time with todays and a bit less time with yesterdays and tomorrows.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“the magic of a lit window on a dark night, the magic of the wild green land, the magic of birds' nest boy hair and trampolines and hot tea and glacier eyes lit with laughter, the magic of living, living, living.
That was the magic that made wildflowers bloom.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“You’re still here, they said, those echoes of all the Sera’s that ever were. You went up in flames, but you’re still here. You’ll go up in flames again, but that’s ok, you know what to do now. You’ve done it already.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“There is always a little magic in the heart of a person who loves it.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Marvellous work,” Clemmie said to Sera. “I was just thinking this morning that what we really needed in our lives was not a new fireplace or a nice car but, in fact, a resurrected fucking rooster.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“And what she saw, for the first time, was not ugliness at all but pain so enormous and consuming that it had felt like dying. I’m sorry, she said silently to her past self. I’m sorry I hated you. I’m sorry I wasn’t kinder. All the shame that had been tangled up in the memory was annihilated, leaving only compassion and regret in its place.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“transmutation. She saw the memory through his eyes. And what she saw, for the first time, was not ugliness at all but pain so enormous and consuming that it had felt like dying. I’m sorry, she said silently to her past self. I’m sorry I hated you. I’m sorry I wasn’t kinder. All the shame that had been tangled up in the memory was annihilated, leaving only compassion and regret in its place.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“That was inspiring,” Matilda said admiringly. “If I wasn’t gay and your grandma, I’d be very attracted to you right about now.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“This was a place stitched together by resistance, by acts of defiance by people who could not or would not go gently down the path the world had decided was inevitable…”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Also, I hope you have an umbrella. It rains apple blossom tea in this room every Sunday.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Some people simply weren’t winter people. Sera, on the other hand, was the most winter person to ever winter. No matter how tedious it was to keep the firewood topped up and keep casting the heat spells, no matter how annoying the inconsistent hot water and temperamental boiler, this was her time.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“It seemed at first glance like ridiculous theatre, unnecessary and a bit silly, but at the heart of it, weren’t they just a handful of people trying to be good to one another?”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Like his lonely and her lonely fit perfectly into the empty spaces at the other’s side, saying nothing, asking nothing, just keeping each other company.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Like little pieces of me keep chipping away, bit by bit, and each time something goes, that version of me dies. Sometimes it’s big things that do it. Sometimes it’s small, stupid things. A dead great-aunt. A leaky roof. Exile. Ugly posters at the pub. Lost magic. A fight with a friend. It’s like the world gets just a little less magical each time, and I get a little smaller. And every time I close my eyes, there’s a huge, dark emptiness where the stars are supposed to be.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“This is the life I wanted. This life of contentment and unexpected excitement, of little everyday joys, where I don’t just get to be myself but also get to be embraced as myself. It’s miraculous.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“I’m at my wits’ end,” Sera informed her. “My wits, as it were, have ended.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“The earth doesn’t want me and the water could drown me, so I don’t belong anywhere anymore, and the ghosts remind me of that more than anything else. I talk about them like they’re not me because they’re not, because they left me behind, one after another, and each time, they’ve left me smaller and heavier,”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Well. Well. Did it hurt? When you fell out of whichever Norse myth you came from?”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Albert, it seemed, had forgotten that his history might be a legacy of power, but hers was a legacy of resistance.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“The thing a great many witches never understood about magic was its heart. It grew in the bones of witches, just as it had once grown in long-lost creatures like wyverns and six-tusked elephants, but what so many of those witches did not realise was that what it wanted was to be loved. It could be tender in one witch’s hands and violent in another’s, it could be vast or it could be small, it could be a night sky or teeth or lightning, but the one thing that never changed was that what it sought and what it repaid, above all else, was love.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Does it make you happy?” “Yeah.” “And is it doing anyone any harm?” “No?” “Then who the fuck cares what anyone else thinks?”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Why do you find it so easy to be kind to me and so difficult to be kind to yourself?”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“That, Luke could understand. History was how he made sense of the world, after all, and what was history if not a collection of stories to make the incomprehensible comprehensible?”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Your foot’s not ugly. It’s never been ugly. It’s held you up all your life, even when it hurt. Maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s so much strength and beauty in that.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“For a moment, it was just Sera and the horizon and the few valiant, twinkling stars of magic that had never left.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“So was it before or after you had the twins that you noticed how much of a fuckwit your father is?”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Sera tried not to think about those months when things felt like they were at their worst, before medication, before she’d asked for help. She hated that version of her. Hated the fights she’d have with Jasmine, the speed with which she’d lose her temper, the long days of not being able to get out of bed, the dark and terrifying things she’d think about doing. Hated, more than anything, the way it felt like she simply had no control over anything, not even herself. It was one of the sharpest, most crooked things on her memory lane, and she tried not to get too close to it.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Magic’s like anything else. It gets depleted when you use it, and then time, rest, and a nice cup of tea top it up again.”
― Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping