English Magic Quotes

Welcome to the Folly," he said. "Official home of English magic since 1775." "And your patron saint is Sir Isaac Newton?" I asked. Nightingale grinned. "He was our founder and the first man to systemize the practice of magic." "I was taught that he invented modern science," I said. "He did both," said Nightingale. "That's the nature of genius." Nightingale ~ Ben Aaronovitch

The risks involved in the pursuit of magic are
put simply
either getting frightened by unpleasant perceptions or becoming deluded. Unfortunately it is possible to suffer from both symptoms at the same time. ~ Philip Carr-Gomm

He wished he had never come to London. He wished he had never undertaken to revive English magic. He wished he had stayed at Hurtfew Abbey, reading and doing magic for his own pleasure. None of it, he thought, was worth the loss of forty books. ~ Susanna Clarke

Suddenly it seemed that all that had been learnt in every English childhood of the wildness of English magic might still be true, and even now on some long-forgotten paths, behind the sky, on the other side of the rain, John Uskglass might be riding still, with his company of men and fairies. Most ~ Susanna Clarke

Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic. ~ Susanna Clarke

English fondness for France is normally a sort of neutron love: take away the people and leave the buildings standing. ~ Anthony Lane

There is always magic to be summoned at any point. I love to live in a world of magic, but not a fake world of magic. We all really basically have a lot of magic ... It's only those of us who choose to accept it, that really understand it. It's there for everyone. That's the only thing that I feel I am able to give to people and that's why I know that they respond to me because I try to give them only their own magic ... not mine, but theirs ~ Stevie Nicks

Who understands war: the solders? the homeless ones? Mussolini? Or the leaders of the English and the Americans? No, nobody understands war, they only think they do. Maybe the earth that drinks up the blood understands it and says: How foolish is man. Of all the animals that lives upon me, he is the cleverest and the most foolish. ~ Erik Christian Haugaard

You will find that there is no death at all, in the true sense of the word, but everything goes on living, transmuting and becoming perfect according to primitive laws. ~ Franz Bardon

Magic Johnson was my favorite player growing up. ~ Russell Westbrook

Love is a magical shelter where you will feel yourself safe beneath it! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Ironically, for a few million people in the Far East, I did become an English teacher through my music. ~ Pat Boone

It is on those mist-filled nights, when the wind is strong and curious, when the air is alive with something unseen but felt, that you finally believe ... oh, yes, you finally believe what your heart has always known: magic is real and it is everywhere. - Diary of a Pagan ~ J.R. Rain

With a little persuasion, any familiar thing can turn abnormal in the mind. Here's a thought experiment. Consider this brutal bit of magic: A human grows a second human in a space inside her belly; she grows a second heart and a second brain, second eyes and second limbs, a complete set of second body parts as if for use as spares, and then, after almost a year, she expels that second screaming being out of her belly and into the world, alive. Bizarre, isn't it? ~ Karen Thompson Walker

We're both staring at our joined hands. I can still feel his magic. ~ Rainbow Rowell

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English. ~ Winston S. Churchill

Take advantage of the opportunities you have during your program. It's not every day that you get to live in Florida with incredible people and make magic daily. During the last two months of my program, Sara and I made sure we conquered as much on our bucket list as possible. If you make a bucket list, use it. Don't regret not doing something when you have the chance. ~ Sara Lopes

Stewart, with the help of his incredibly astute staff, was combining reporting with commentary, pointing a finger at stupidity and hollowness, and devising a creative hand grenade. All of it had political purpose and direction. It wasn't strictly ideological, although he's obviously left of center. And he was fearless, not in the sense that anybody was going to make him a political prisoner. But he punched up. He punched up, and the shots landed.

I don't think the world is any more absurd now than it's ever been, or more tragic, or more beautiful. But Jon took advantage of these new ways of seeing the world and took out his magic marker and drew circles around the idiocy. He set out to be a working comedian, and he ended up an invaluable patriot. He wants his country to be better, more decent, and to think harder.

~ DAVID REMNICK, editor in chief, the New Yorker ~ Chris Smith

Cinema Paradiso, because it reminds me of why I make movies, the magic of movies, the romance of movies. ~ Antoine Fuqua

I explained as much as I knew of the seal-cutter's way of jadoo; but her argument was much more simple: "The magic that is always demanding gifts is no true magic," said she. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They're not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we're waiting to die. ~ Alan Moore

I want for India complete independence in the full English sense of that English term. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

That's the beginning of magic. Let your imagination run and follow it. ~ Patricia A. McKillip

So the laws of good driving forbade you to go off the magic ribbon except in extreme emergencies. You were ethically entitled to several inches of margin at the right-hand edge; and the man approaching you was entitled to an equal number of inches; which left a remainder of inches between the two projectiles as they shot by. It sounds risky as one tells it, but the heavens are run on the basis of similar calculations, and while collisions do happen, they leave time enough in between for universes to be formed, and successful careers conducted by men of affairs. ~ Upton Sinclair

You used your power to toss one rock at me?" he exclaimed, an almost comic note of incredulity in his voice.
"On the contrary," I heard Dorian say pleasantly. "I didn't use magic for that. I just threw it. ~ Richelle Mead

And, so to tell more about the South Watcher. A million years gone, as I have told, came it out from the blackness of the South, and grew steadily nearer through twenty thousand years; but so slow that in no one year could a man perceive that it had moved. ~ William Hope Hodgson

I want to say unequivocally that while I cherish every person who comes from anywhere, who comes here legally and seeks to pursue happiness, and I hope all of them decide to stay and become American citizens, but I want them to become American. And part of becoming American involved English. It is vital historically to assert and establish that English is the common language at the heart of our civilization. ~ Newt Gingrich

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry - English, Russian and French - than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several - Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke - have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Making a martial arts film in English to me is the same as John Wayne speaking Chinese in a western ~ Ang Lee

I actually speak fluent English and Spanish and ... I dabble in a couple of languages, but I'm not fluent in German, Russian and Arabic. ~ Cote De Pablo

Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for the change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Nicholas says that magic isn't inherently good or bad, it's what people do with it that makes it that way. It took me a long time to understand that. Once I did, I realized it isn't magic that separates us from them, or you from me. It's misunderstanding. ~ Virginia Boecker

Well, good luck,' the Vietnam verbal tic...It was as though people couldn't stop themselves from saying it, even when they actually meant to express the opposite wish, like, 'Die, motherfucker.' Usually it was only an uninhabited passage of dead language, sometimes it came out five times in a sentence, like punctuation, often it was spoken flat side up to telegraph the belief that there wasn't any way out; tough shit, sin loi, smack it, good luck. Sometimes, though, it was said with such feeling and tenderness that it could crack your mask, that much love where there was so much war. Me too, every day, compulsively, good luck: to friends in the press corps going out on operations, to grunts I'd meet at firebases and airstrips, to the wounded, the dead and all the Vietnamese I ever saw getting fucked over by us and each other, less often but most passionately to myself, and though I meant it every time I said it, it was meaningless. It was like telling someone going out in a storm not to get any on him, it was the same as saying, 'Gee, I hope you don't get killed or wounded or see anything that drives you insane.' You could make all the ritual moves, carry your lucky piece, wear your magic jungle hat, kiss your thumb knuckle smooth as stones under running water, the Inscrutable Immutable was still out there, and you kept on or not at its pitiless discretion. All you could say that wasn't fundamentally lame was something like, 'He who bites it this day is safe from the next,' a ~ Michael Herr

We had probably our best ever Player of the Year Dance last week. You elected Dennis Wise as Player of the Year. Dennis accepted his award mimicking Vialli, whereupon Zola shouted 'Speak English', Dennis switched to his normal Cockney voice only for Zola to shout 'You're still not speaking English'. ~ Ken Bates

I know more English than Spanish, but I'm always a little embarrassed. ~ Romain Duris

The brown earth, the torn, blasted earth, with a greasy shine under the sun's rays; the earth is the background of this restless, gloomy world of automatons, our gasping is the scratching of a quill, our lips are dry, our heads are debauched with stupor - thus we stagger forward, and into our pierced and shattered souls bores the torturing image of the brown earth with the greasy sun and the convulsed and dead soldiers, who lie there - it can't be helped - who cry and clutch at our legs as we spring away over them. We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill. ~ Erich Maria Remarque