c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Pegi just recorded "I Don't Want to Talk About," written by Danny Whitten, the original Crazy Horse guitar player and singer who's all over Early Daze, an album of songs from the beginning of Crazy Horse that I have been working on compiling recently. Danny was every bit the artist I am, but he died of a heroin OD in the early seventies. Every time I hear Pegi sing that song, it makes me tremendously sad. She sings it so beautifully, phrasing it to break my heart. She does it justice. You can see I have some unfinished business with Danny.
— Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream
Continents of memory had been lost.
— Alan Lightman, The Diagnosis
To remember is to disengage from the present.
— Garth Stein
That's what memory is like: layers, one overlapping another, and compacting down the way old leaves slowly crumble and turn to a rich peaty soil, nourishing the new things that will grow. It's why it's important, remembering things. It's why it matters, when the memories aren't there, and no one fills in the gaps for you.
— Julia Green, Drawing with Light
Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.
— Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists
Even a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day.
— Karen Amanda Hooper, Grasping at Eternity
Hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long. Plato, in his Republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. It seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he had taught them to be happy; and Seneca, speaking of the Roman lads in olden days, says, "They were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting." Were they any the worse for it in manhood? Do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, "He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death." Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason.The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. You fail to see that this very facility proves that they are not learning. Their shining, polished brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things you show them, but nothing sinks in. The child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless.Although memory and reason are wholly different faculties, the one does not really develop apart from the other. Before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education
I sit alone in a dead world. The wind blows hot and dry, and the dust gathers like particles of memory waiting to be swept away. I pray for forgetfulness, yet my memory remains strong, as does the outstretched arm of the oppressive air. It seems as if the wind has been there since the beginning of the nightmare. Sometimes loud and harsh, a thousand sharp needles scratching at my reddened skin. Sometimes a whisper, a curious sigh in the black of night, of words more frightening than pain. I know now the wind has been speaking to me. Only I couldn't understand because I was too scared. I am scared now as I write these words. Still, there is nothing else to do.
— Christopher Pike, Whisper of Death
In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse
We may just be specters in this world, but our stories, if they are remembered and retold, become real and solid and alive... Once you hear a story, it becomes part of you. It can't die.
— Candace Fleming, On the Day I Died: Stories from the Grave
Blackouts can be fun if approached with the right mindset. You just can't sweat the fact that you've lost a small portion of your life for all eternity. Occasionally, little bubbles of memory will float up like surreal Mylar party balloons at unexpected times throughout the net day and start piecing together a colorful, if incomplete, version of reality.
— Josh Kilmer-Purcell, I Am Not Myself These Days
...I still cannot tap on your walls and discover by the hollow or firm sounds which of your walls are merely decorative, and which ones hold everything up.
— Philip J. Hilts, Memory's Ghost: The Nature Of Memory And The Strange Tale Of Mr. M
Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.
— Frank McCourt
human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions
— Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
Maybe Cubism started this way. Memory re-arranging a face.
— Mary Rakow, The Memory Room
In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.
— John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure
Forgetting! It is a form of suicide, a renunciation of the only good the we truly and ineluctably possess: the past. For if joys alone were forgotten, perhaps oblivion would be justly desired. But we are proud and jealous of our sorrows, we love them, we want to remember them. It is they that comprise the crown of life.
— Iginio Ugo Tarchetti
Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable.
— Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
It was funny the way memory obliged the heart. His happy recollections were always afloat in his soupy subconscious where so many of his darker memories had sunk to the underbelly of his past and been as good as lost forever. But without conscious instruction, memory had edited and enlarged the finest moments of his life and stored them like masterpieces in the private gallery of his personal history.
— Nanci Kincaid, Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi
How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.
— Wendell Phillips
Even after everyone had gone home, the house was filled with the good time they’d had, as if it could linger in the air like the voices and music lingered in memory. Mina wrapped the memory up and put it in her heart; there was a quiet gladness, deep like a tree and tall in her
— Cynthia Voigt, Come a Stranger
A face stared up at her from the mirror beside her hand. Was that really what she looked like? Was that really what she looked like, all sharp lines and huge silver-grey eyes? Certainly, no one would ever call those features beautiful, Jame thought ruefully; but were they really enough like a boy's to have fooled that old man the alley? Well, maybe with that long black hair out of sight under a cap. It was a very young face and a defiant one, she thought with a odd sense of detachment, but frightened, too. And those extraordinary eyes... what memories lived in them that she could not share? Stranger, where have you been she asked silently. What have you seen? The thin lips locked in their secrets."Ahhh!" Jame said in sudden disgust, tossing away the mirror. Fool, to be obsessed with a past she couldn't even remember. But it was all behind her now.
— P.C. Hodgell, God Stalk
Wait." Walter went to the basket, taking what was a gray sleeve, drawing it out fro the middle of the heap. "Oh," He said. He held the shapeless wool sweater to his chest. Joyce had knit for months the year Daniel died, and here was the result, her handiwork, the garment that would fit a giant. It was nothing more than twelve skeins of yarn and thousands of loops, but it had the power to bring back in a flash the green-tiled walls of the hospital, the sound of an ambulance trying to cut through city traffic in the distance, the breathing of the dying boy, his father staring at the ceiling, the full greasy bucket of fried chicken on he bed table. "I'll take this one," Walter said, balling up the sweater as best he could, stuffing it into a shopping bag that was half full of the books he was taking home, that he was borrowing."Oh, honey," Joyce said. "You don't want that old scrap.""You made it. I remember your making it." Keep it light, he said to himself, that's a boy. "There's a use for it. Don't you think so, Aunt Jeannie? No offense, Mom, but I could invade the Huns with it or strap the sleeves to my car tires in a blizzard, for traction, or protect our nation with it out in space, a shield against nuclear attack."Jeannie tittered in her usual way in spite of herself. "You always did have that sense of humor," she said as she went upstairs. When she was out of range, Joyce went to Walter's bag and retrieved the sweater. She laid it on the card table, the long arms hanging down, and she fingered the stitches. "Will you look at the mass of it," she exclaimed. "I don't even recall making it."""'Memory -- that strange deceiver,'" Walter quoted.
— Jane Hamilton, The Short History of a Prince
If I could just capture each memory in a bottle the maybe you people would understand how much I've suffered, how much I've been through, but most importantly how far I have come.
— Tommy Tran
His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past. His father, meanwhile, had no idea that such a vivid scene was burned into Tengo's brain or that, like a cow in the meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his secrets.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 BOOK 1
From key signature to coda, from downbeat to the sound of life's final fermata, our pasts set the tone for all that was, that is, and that ever would be.
— Jamie A. Hughes
(...) always regretted that good memory often prevents us from thinking for ourselves.
— Frank Harris, My Life and Loves
Anyone know how can erase mind memory?
— Hiren Patel
Nothing stands still, except in our memory.
— Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden
What business does memory have with time?
— Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins
Deep in Decemberit's nice to remember without a hurt the heart is hollow.
— Tom Jones, The Fantasticks
Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant…
— Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson
The Gentle GardenerI'd like to leave but daffodils to mark my little way,To leave but tulips red and white behind me as I stray;I'd like to pass away from earth and feel I'd left behindBut roses and forget-me-nots for all who come to find.I'd like to sow the barren spots with all the flowers of earth,To leave a path where those who come should find but gentle mirth;And when at last I'm called upon to join the heavenly throngI'd like to feel along my way I'd left no sign of wrong.And yet the cares are many and the hours of toil are few;There is not time enough on earth for all I'd like to do;But, having lived and having toiled, I'd like the world to findSome little touch of beauty that my soul had left behind.
— Edgar A. Guest
I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library
— Carl Sagan
What is it like to wear another person’s skin?”“I don’t have a good answer for that,” I said. “It hurts.”“Can you remember their stories? Can you feel the love that they felt?
— Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
You know the saying a rolling stone gathers no moss? I'm the opposite. I've gathered too much, and when one thing happens, it brings up everything else that's ever been similar to it. I don't just feel things once and then move on. I fell them over and over again, and the only new thing is whatever precipitated the memory of the old, so it never really feels new at all. Everything just gets integrated into one big giant ball...
— Jane Devin, Elephant Girl: A Human Story
I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.
— Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove
It was clear that he didn't remember me from one day to the next. The note clipped to his sleeve simply informed him that it was not our first meeting, but it could not bring back the memory of the time we had spent together.
— Yōko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor
You’re with a girl. She’s brown-haired and side-swept. I imagine that she’s the kind of girl who can easily shop for jean shorts, and speaks kindly more often than not. She seems like the kind of girl who hates New York City because it wreaks havoc on her shoes (really she just thinks it’s a big and scary place), but once had the time of her life in Spain on a backpacking trip when she was 23. Her gaze is focused on the embracing couple as near strangers capable of judgement. She stands bolted next to you like you’re her anchor in the social storm.You two seem finely matched… but what do I know? (Nothing at all.)I accidentally saw a picture of you and it reminded me that I was dating a man rightfully shaking his fist at God, while trying to hold my hand with the other. I was reminded of how fiercely we tried to hold our relationship together, and how devastated and relieved we were in its destruction. There’s water under that bridge.I accidentally saw a picture of you. No big deal. I wrote about it.
— Joy Wilson
I'm in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it’s 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world.
— Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales: and Other Stories
He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function is to leave just a trace in memory.
— Chris Marker
I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.
— Neil Gaiman
[Memory]... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense....Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world.
— John Daniel, Looking After: A Son's Memoir
True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves
And be thinking, remembering. Trying to. All difficult dark stuff, stories stuffed away, like old socks into old pillowcases. Not quite knowing the weight of truth in them much more. And things that I have let be a long time in the interests of happiness, or at least that daily contentment that I was once I do believe mistress of
— Sebastian Barry, On Canaan's Side
I kissed my fingers,held my palm flat beside my mouth and blew it into the air that surrounded her memory. I closed my eyes, thinking this was one of those moments you see in movies or read about in books where everything comes together.
— Belinda Jeffrey, One Long Thread
He was already fading. I knew that it wouldn't be long until he was just a vague image, however much I tried to cling onto his memory.
— Caroline Green, Dark Ride
Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talos's play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present.
— Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lictor
It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
— China Miéville, Embassytown
The undead did not love, but they remembered love with a savage loyalty.
— Kim Harrison, A Perfect Blood
You are speaking...as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing... what you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure.
— C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against, every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.
— Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love
Often, as she leafed through the sticky, plastic-coated pages, spotting herself with a frizzy perm or wearing a loud, printed blouse, she was struck by how long life was, and how much time had passed, and she wished she could go back and apologize to those closest to her, explain that she understood now. Impossible, and yet the urge to return and be a different person never lessened, grew only more acute.
— Stewart O'Nan, Emily, Alone
The soft strings of the lute rippled with memories, and the maid's lilting voice made Mary sigh as she closed her eyes. She fell asleep filled with sadness, but without regret.
— Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland and The Isles
At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise the pieces of him apart. Only when she failed had she finally let go, by then months had passed. She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back
— Aminatta Forna
I'm thinking about past events. I'm interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.
— Dana Spiotta
How easily they spoke of love. And yet, when she'd needed the certainty of his feeling for her, he'd let her slip away, never able to bring himself to tell her about the ways in which he'd been changed. He'd been incapable he'd let Nenebah believe the problem lay with her.
— Aminatta Forna
Each of us, I think, adopts a comfortable and familiar era or place in which to plant ourselves; and from then on, that which disagrees with our memories -- a new building here, a change in paint there -- is forever jarring and anachronistic.
— Daniel D. Victor, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Seventh Bullet
Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead....Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys in polyester baseball uniforms.
— Stewart O'Nan, Emily, Alone
And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state.
— Aminatta Forna
Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious.If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
— James Williams
We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.
— J.K. Rowling
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
— W.B. Yeats
I address you all tonight for who you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.
— Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
It's still magic even if you know how it's done.
— Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don't want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.
— Charles de Lint
Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.
— Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.That’s what I believe.The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.
— Robert McCammon, Boy's Life
hark, now hear the sailors cry, smell the sea, and feel the sky let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic...
— Van Morrison
I turned to leave and paused before the gap in the ruined wall. "One last thing, Your Majesty. I'd like a name I can put into my report, something shorter than typing out 'The Leader of the Southern Shapechanger Faction.' What should I call you?""Lord."I rolled my eyes.He shrugged. "It's short.
— Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites
Magic can be found in stolen moments.
— Francesca Lia Block
On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.
— J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
The funny thing about mundies is how obsessed with magic they are for a bunch of people who don't even know what the word means.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
Oh, are you doing magic? Let’s see it, then.”She sat down. Ron looked taken aback.“Er — all right.”He cleared his t
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
If you look up "charming" in the dictionary, you'll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?
— Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming
To have endured horrors, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that honorable and brave— that was magical.
— Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Apparently wizards poke their noses in everywhere!
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
...something was starting to take shape, out of magic and will. Smoke and bone.
— Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
No more tubs for me." I jumped off the bed and pulled on a pair of Pack sweats. "They make me lose all sense."Curran sprawled on the bed with a big self-satisfied smile. "Want to know a secret?""Sure.""It's not the bathtub, baby."Well, aren't we smug. I picked up the corner of the lowest mattress and made a show of looking under it."What are you looking for?""A pea Your Majesty.""What?""You heard me."I jumped back as he lunged and his fingers missed me by an inch."Getting slow in your old age.""I thought you liked it slow."A flashback to last night mugged me and my mind executed a full stop.He laughed. "Ran out of snappy comebacks?""Hush. I'm trying to think of one.
— Ilona Andrews, Magic Bleeds
I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sense enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us
— Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
But remember. Just because you don't believe in something doesn't mean it isn't real.
— Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
As I look out at all of you gathered here, I want to say that I don't see a room full of Parisians in top hats and diamonds and silk dresses. I don't see bankers and housewives and store clerks. No. I address you all tonight as you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.
— Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Snow flurries began to fall and they swirled around people's legs like house cats. It was magical, this snow globe world.
— Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen
We be light, we be life, we be fire! We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven! Come be we and be free!
— Kate Griffin, A Madness of Angels
To each his own magic.
— Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing
(I)f you do not believe that hearts can bloom suddenly bigger, and that love can open like a flower out of even the hardest places, then I am afraid that for you the road will be long and brown and barren, and you will have trouble finding the 
— Lauren Oliver, Liesl & Po
Magic comes from what is inside you. It is a part of you. You can't weave together a spell that you don't beleive in.
— Jim Butcher
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 gives you a lot of choices," Grandad says. "Most of them are bad.
— Holly Black, Red Glove
When you can have anything you want by uttering a few words, the goal matters not, only the journey to it. 
— Christopher Paolini, Eldest
When you're touched by magic, nothing's ever quite the same again. What really makes me sad is all those people who never have the chance to know that touch. They're too busy, or they just don't hold with make-believe, so they shut the door without really knowing it was there to be opened in the first place.
— Charles de Lint, What the Mouse Found and Other Stories
There's a lot of magic between you too, ain't no denying that. And magic makes forgettin' hard.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Best of Me
He goes directly to the ballroom, making his way to the center of the dance floor. He takes Celia’s arm, spinning her away from Herr Thiessen.Marco pulls her to him in an emerald embrace, so close that no one distinction remains between where his suite ends and her gown begins. To Celia there is suddenly no one else in the room as he holds her in his arms. But before she can vocalize her surprise, his lips close over hers and she is lost in wordless bliss. Marco kisses her as though they are the only two people in the world. The air swirls in a tempest around them, blowing open the glass doors to the garden with a tangle of billowing curtains. Every eye in the ballroom turns in their direction. And then he releases her and walks away. By the time Marco leaves the room, almost everyone has forgotten the incident entirely. It is replaced by a momentary confusion that is blamed on the heat or the excessive amounts of champagne. Herr Thiessen cannot recall why Celia has suddenly stopped dancing, or when her gown has shifted to its current deep green. “Is something wrong?” he asks, when he realizes that she is trembling.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
It's all a matter of paying attention, being awake in the present moment, and not expecting a huge payoff. The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.
— Charles de Lint
Like magic, she felt him getting nearer, felt it like a pull in the pit of her stomach. It felt like hunger but deeper, heavier. Like the best kind of expectation. Ice cream expectation. Chocolate expectation.
— Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen
In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.
— Lev Grossman, The Magicians
Magical places are always beautiful and deserve to be contemplated ... Always stay on the bridge between the invisible and the visible. 
— Paulo Coelho
But all the magic I have knownI've had to make myself.
— Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends
If you look hard and long, you can find us. If you listen hard and long, you can hear any of us, call any of us that you wish.
— Tamora Pierce, Wild Magic
Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold...The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Anytime you feel love for anything, be it stone, tree, lover, or child, you are touched by the Goddess's magick...
— Cate Tiernan, Book of Shadows
We've strayed into a zone with a high magical index,' he said. 'Don't ask me how. Once upon a time a really powerful magic field must have been generated here, and we're feeling the after-effects.'Precisely,' said a passing bush.
— Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic
It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.
— Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic
Imagine, and it shall be.There are no limits.⁠⁠⁠⁠
— Evelyn Skye, The Crown's Game
Magic is really only the utilization of the entire spectrum of the senses. Humans have cut themselves off from their senses. Now they see only a tiny portion of the visible spectrum, hear only the loudest of sounds, their sense of smell is shockingly poor and they can only distinguish the sweetest and sourest of tastes.
— Michael Scott, The Alchemyst
This witch had been crafted from the darkness between the stars.
— Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows
My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.
— Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals
Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic--which was what all magic was--it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally attractive bundle that...might, if it were in a good mood, sit on your knee and purr. Magic never sat on anybody's knee and purred.
— Robin McKinley, Spindle's End
You must learn to heed your senses. Humans use but a tiny percentage of theirs. They barely look, they rarely listen, they never smell, and they think that they can only experience feelings through their skin. But they talk, oh, do they talk.
— Michael Scott, The Alchemyst
That's the beauty of it. Have you seen the contraptions these magicians build to accomplish the most mundane feats? They are a bunch of fish covered in feathers trying to convince the public they can fly, I am simply a bird in their midst.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
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
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
Like I said, magic comes from life, and especially from emotions. They're a source of the same intangible energy that everyone can feel when an autumn moon rises and fills you with a sudden sense of bone-deep excitement, or when the first warm breeze of spring rushes past your face, full of the scents of life, and drowns you in a sudden flood of unreasoning joy. The passion of mighty music that brings tears to your eyes, and the raw, bubbling, infectious laughter of small children at play, the bellowing power of a stadium full of football fans shouting "Hey!" in time to that damned song—they're all charged with magic.My magic comes from the same places. And maybe from darker places than that. Fear is an emotion, too. So is rage. So is lust. And madness. I'm not a particularly good person. I'm no Charles Manson or anything, but I'm not going to be up for canonization either. Though in the past, I think maybe I was a better person than I am today. In the past I hadn't seen so many people hurt and killed and terrorized by the same kind of power that damn well should have been making the world a nicer place, or at the least staying the hell away from it. I hadn't made so many mistakes back then, so many shortsighted decisions, some of which had cost people their lives. I had been sure of myself. I had been whole.
— Jim Butcher, Dead Beat
You know, I preferred you as an evil monk. Would have made killing you a whole lot easier.
— Chris d'Lacey
There's a flame of magic inside every stone & every flower, every bird that sings & every frog that croaks. There's magic in the trees & the hills & the river & the rocks, in the sea & the stars & the wind, a deep, wild magic that's as old as the world itself. It's in you too, my darling girl, and in me, and in every living creature, be it ever so small. Even the dirt I'm sweeping up now is stardust. In fact, all of us are made from the stuff of stars.
— Kate Forsyth, The Puzzle Ring
Love isn't a decision. It's a feeling. If we could decide who we loved,it would be much simpler, but much less magical
— Trey Parker
That's what's so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you're so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can't remember what happens next.
— Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic
So why not live with the magic? Be a kid again and believe in the fantastical. Life is more fun with a little smoke and mirrors.
— L.H. Cosway, Six of Hearts
The door opened. She looked in the mirror and suppressed a curse. Slipping in behind some tourists, that winged shadow was back again. Karou rose and made for the bathroom, where she took the note that Kishmish had come to de
— Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power...It must follow knowledge, and serve need.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
A black cat crossed my path, and I stopped to dance around it widdershins and to sing the 
— Joanne Harris, Chocolat
Want me to flex my magic for you, baby?
— Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon's Covenant
Is magic not enough to live for?" Widget asks."Magic," the man in the grey suit repeats, turning the word into a laugh. "This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it. Look around you," he says, waving a hand at the surrounding tables. "Not a one of them even has an inkling of the things that are possible in this world, and what's worse is that none of them would listen if you attempted to enlighten them. They want to believe that magic is nothing but clever deception, because to think it real would keep them up at night, afraid of their own existence.""But some people can be enlightened," Widget says.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
The spell...curled around...like smoke before settling in.Sophie: "Okay, do you guys feel protected?"Archer: "Yes. Also a little violated, but that's neither here nor there.
— Rachel Hawkins, Spell Bound
Ishabal: "If you may correct your vision as you like, why do you wear spectacles?" Tris: "Because I like them. Because I have better things to do with my magic than fixing my vision when ordinary glass will do.
— Tamora Pierce, The Will of the Empress
Briar: "They never tell you some things. They tell you mages have wonderful power and they learn all kinds of secrets. Nobody ever mentions that some secrets you don't ever want to learn." Rosethorn: "All you can do is learn good to balance the bad. Learn and do all the good within your reach. Then, if you wake in a sweat, you have something to set against the dream.
— Tamora Pierce, Street Magic
I was going to say he's aimless," the witch replied. "I know he's a bit old to be old to living at home with his mom, but he's had a difficult time holding a job. He's worked at Wendy's, Taco Bell, and Burger King, but it all ends the same way- he challenges his manager to combat, takes over the restaurant, and enslaves his coworkers. Then it's back to video games." - Morgan le Fay
— Michael Buckley, Magic and Other Misdemeanors
The first thing every mage should learn is that magic makes fools of us. Now you may call yourself a mage. You have learned the most important lesson.
— Tamora Pierce, Melting Stones
The spells are made up. I have met people who assure me, very seriously, that they are trying to do them, and I can assure them, just as seriously, that they don’t work.
— J.K. Rowling
... 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
It might have all the same
—  you never can tell what's magic.
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,And ye that on the sands with printless footDo chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly himWhen he comes back; you demi-puppets thatBy moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastimeIs to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoiceTo hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm’dThe noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vaultSet roaring war: to the dread rattling thunderHave I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oakWith his own bolt; the strong-based promontoryHave I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d upThe pine and cedar: graves at my commandHave waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forthBy my so potent art. But this rough magicI here abjure, and, when I have requiredSome heavenly music, which even now I do,To work mine end upon their senses thatThis airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,And deeper than did ever plummet soundI’ll drown my book.
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest
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
I love you." Why it worked right then, why the webbing of my godmother's spell frayed as though the words had been an open flame, I don't know. I haven't found any explanation for it. There aren't any magical words, really. The words just hold the magic. They give it a shape and a form, they make it useful, describe the images within. I'll say this, though: Some words have a power that has nothing to do with supernatural forces. They resound in the heart and mind, they live long after the sounds of them have died away, they echo in the heart and the soul. They have power, and that power is very real. Those three words are good ones.
— Jim Butcher, Grave Peril
I didn't want to believe that killing was deep inside of me. I didn't want to think about the part of me that took a dark joy in gathering all the power it could and using it as I saw fit, everything else be damned. There was power to be had in hatred, too, in anger and in lust, in selfishness and in pride. And I knew that there was some dark corner of me that would enjoy using magic for killing—and then long for more. That was black magic, and it was easy to use. Easy and fun. Like Legos.
— Jim Butcher, Fool Moon
Nothing is lost that we do not first see as lost. Visions born of fear give birth to our failing.Visions born of hope give birth to our success.What is possible lives within us, and it only remains for us to discover it.
— Terry Brooks
Love and magic have a great deal in common. they enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take practice.
— Nora Roberts
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
Those who spell Magic with a K aren't.
— Anton Szandor LaVey
If you are drawn to the left hand path, it's usually because you've had some kind of life experience that has shocked you, awakened you.
— Nikolas Schreck
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.
— Robert Bloch, Psycho
Magic is a matter of focusing the disciplined will. But sometimes the will must be abandoned. The secret lies in knowing when to exercise control, and when to let go.
— Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lady of Avalon
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
I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.
— Alan Rickman
It's easy, there's a trick to it, you do it or you die.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Magic is the art of thinking, not strength or language.
— Christopher Paolini, Eldest
I need it! I need it! It's a royal heirloom!""Adrian?""What are you doing here?""Looking for you. Come on, we need to go. I'll drive you home.""No, I can't. Not until we get it. He stole it!
— Richelle Mead, The Fiery Heart