[She] had felt straight away that she wasn’t meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one.

It's easy to believe in magic when you're young. Anything you couldn't explain was magic then. It didn't matter if it was science or a fairy tale. Electricity and elves were both infinitely mysterious and equally possible - elves probably more so.

That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time. The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.

You can't stand up to the night until you understand what's hiding in its shadows.

Even, she thought, even without the gift of witchsight, there was more beauty to be found in the world than could ever be snared in language or music. And with the sight.