He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.

Inside every lump of coal there's a diamond waiting to get out.

That was always the dream, wasn't it? 'I wish I'd known then what I know now'? But when you got older you found out that you NOW wasn't YOU then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.

She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it.

Some People think 'coven' is a word for a group of witches, and it's true that's what the dictionary says. But the real word for a group of witches is 'an argument'.

Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

Magic is just a way of saying 'I don't know.'