Hexperiment: to use magic just to see what happens. (W)
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... being turned in to something small and sticky often offends. (W)
It wasn’t a spell, except in her own head, but if you couldn’t make spells work in your own head you couldn’t make them work at all. (W)
'... that’s why I don’t like magic, captain. ’Cos it’s magic. You can’t ask questions, it’s magic. It doesn’t explain
anything, it’s magic. You don’t know where it comes from, it’s magic! That’s what I don’t like about magic, it does everything by magic!' (Th) 'Magic is basically just movin’ stuff around,’ said Ridcully. (DW)
What was magic, after all, but something that happened at the snap of a finger? Where was the magic in that? It was mumbled words and weird drawings in old books and in the wrong hands it was dangerous as hell, but not one half as dangerous as it could be in the right hands. (GP)
And then thlabber happened. It was a traditional magic term, although Moist didn’t know this. There was a moment in which everything, even things that couldn’t be stretched, felt stretched. And then there was the moment when everything suddenly went back to not being stretched, known as the moment of thlabber. (GP)
Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards – not ‘not doing magic’ because they couldn’t do magic, but not doing magic when they could and didn’t. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you know how easy it is. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn’t been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again. (GP)
'Knowing things is magical, if other people don’t know them.' (HFS)
And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done. (WFM)
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact. (NW)
The Archchancellor polished his staff as he walked along. It was a particularly good one, six feet long and quite magical. Not that he used magic very much. In his experience, anything that couldn’t be disposed of with a couple of whacks from six feet of oak was probably immune to magic as well. (SM)
... the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was successfully demonstrated to be made up of resons* or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at
least five ‘flavours’,known as ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘sideways’, ‘sex appeal’ and ‘peppermint’. * Lit: ‘Thing-ies’ (LL) People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end.
All over the entire room, sometimes. (MP) Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business.
The trick was to do magic and get away with it. (MP) Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.
At least, that’s what wizards say, which is why they charge such swingeingly huge fees for getting involved with the bloody stuff. (MP) All books of magic have a life of their own. Some of the really energetic ones can’t simply be chained to the bookshelves; they have to be nailed shut or kept between steel plates. Or, in the case of the volumes on tantric sex magic for the serious connoisseur, kept under very cold water to stop them bursting into flames and scorching their severely plain covers. (E)
... Cutwell had learned once again that the one universal manifestation of raw, natural magic throughout the universe is this: that any domestic food store, raided furtively in the middle of the night, always contains, no matter what its daytime inventory, half a jar of elderly mayonnaise, a piece of very old cheese, and a tomato with white mould growing on it. (M)
... direct levitation is the hardest of the practical magics, because of the ever-present danger of the well-known
principles of action and reaction, which means that a wizard attempting to lift a heavy item by mind power alone faces the prospect of ending up with his brains in his boots. (ER) ... magic has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass. (ER)
A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls. (LF)
Magic never dies. It merely fades away. (COM)
... magic had indeed once been wild and lawless, but had been tamed back in the mists of time by the Olden Ones, who had bound it to obey among other things the Law of Conservation of Reality; this demanded that the effort needed to achieve a goal should be the same regardless of the means used. In practical terms this meant that, say, creating the illusion of a glass of wine was relatively easy, since it involved merely the subtle shifting of light patterns. On the other hand, lifting a genuine wineglass a few feet in the air by sheer mental energy required several hours of systematic preparation if the wizard wished to prevent the simple principle of leverage flicking his brain out through his ears. (COM)
'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.' (COM)
There may be universes where librarianship is considered a peaceful sort of occupation, and where the risks are limited to large volumes falling off shelves on to one’s head, but the keeper of a magic library is no job for the unwary. (ER)
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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