Deborah Harkness Quotes

I was in a phase when I was obsessed - I still am - with fortunetellers and psychics.

Demonic figures and occult themes have disappeared from modern magic.

I read the horoscope, and when I like it I smile and when I don't like it, I say, 'Dr. Ruth Westheimer, what's the matter with you?'

In many ways, astrology, numerology and palmistry are corruptions of the occult because they have attempted to make a practice out of something that is essentially imaginative.

Fortune-telling doesn't reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so you can get a good look at it.

While I wasn't certain how I felt about spiritualists, I was certain enough about the type of people who were drawn to them. Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.

I can cite a few cases of where people have tampered around with magic and witchcraft that they've been very severely frightened and traumatised by some of the outcomes. I mean we are playing with fire, and I had to say that.

Witches are the kind of more traditional, home and family, craft people - so they're the ones who are making things; crocheting shawls and things like that. But then they also have that slightly confident, dangerous, edge. I always see them as having very extreme hair, either amazingly beautiful straight hair or kind of wild.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

I love mysticism - it's such fun.

I believe in magic, psychics and all that.

I believe in numbers and signs.

But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny.

My grandfather was a faith healer and medium, and he always encouraged faith in the unseen. I believe in fortune tellers.

I used to practice Wicca.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

Cultures, along with the religions that shape and nurture them, are value systems, sets of traditions and habits clustered around one or several languages, producing meaning: for the self, for the here and now, for the community, for life.

I don't expect that the million will ever be won, simply because there is no confirming evidence for any paranormal claims to date.

It will be thought that I am acting strangely in concerning myself at this day with what appears at first sight and simply a well-known method of fortune-telling.

Dreams sometimes foretell the future.

And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.

I'm a storyteller, and I have really good material to work with: I've been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.

I know the difference between black magic and white magic.

My mother taught me to believe in ghosts: to use a Ouija board, have seances, and leave little offerings out for those who have passed.

I don't practise any religion but I am deeply interested in the answers that mankind has come up with to explain the human situation.