Richard Whately Quotes

Love is the final end of the world's history, the Amen of the universe.

Jewelry and profuse ornaments are unmistakable evidences of vulgarity.

If there’s a magic pony in the story, chances are I’ll read it.

The feel of them (books) and the smell of them. A bookshop was like an Aladdin's cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look." Claire (Watermelon)

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.

I don’t have the time to devote to circles or covens. I have to fit things in when and where I can, in stolen moments and cups of coffee. Stirring clockwise to conjure. Widdershins to banish. There’s never enough time, and rarely enough caffeine, but I make do with what I have. Besides, cauldrons and pointy hats are overrated. Sometimes I see other customers practicing. Pouring their cream and sugar with studied intent. Stirring with purpose. I add an extra spoonful of sugar to my own coffee for them, to make all of our enchantments sweeter.

As you sit there and as I sit here, they are going in. They're taking over, and they just walk in and they can do whatever they want. They have essentially already taken it over.

At the centre of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power

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.

All finery is a sign of littleness.

Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.

Writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

You know, I'm not very good at magic - I can only do half of a trick. Yes - I'm a member of the Magic Semi-circle.

It's amazing, 'cause sometimes when we're onstage, I feel like somebody's just moving the pieces. I'm just going, 'God, we don't have any control over this.' And that's magic.

Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.

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.

So she listened hard. And she began to evolve, because stories work their magic that way. They build conviction and erode conviction in equal measure.

We can't say anything, but just remember that, on Fringe, nothing is as it seems. There's always a little more to the story behind the story. He's definitely a large part, going forward. A lot of things will come full circle.

Truth looks tawdry when she is overdressed.

But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be; Within that circle none durst walk but he.

Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

But you speak of Master Gandalf, as if he was in a story that had come to an end.' 'Yes, we do,' said Pippin sadly. 'The story seems to be going on, but I am afraid Gandalf has fallen out of it.

When God closes a door, he opens a window. Yeah. The problem was that this particular window opened off the tenth story, and he wasn't so sure God supplied parachutes.

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.