Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.

Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn't rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled,...it is Art.

She assumes that skill will guide her fingertips, that shapely lines will uncoil out of the pencil the moment she starts. Surely talent is a thing curled deep inside, just waiting to be exercised, and at the slightest invitation it will stretch, shake itself, make itself known? Talent, it seems, is not so insistent.

I learned to fly on a broom," he said, rolling up his sleeves. "I can learn to milk a goat, I bet." Though flying on a broom proved to be the easier task, he found.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last

But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.