"that was kind of the '60s mentality, too—you didn't need to be published, that was mainstream. You just wanted to be an artist and create something."

"Know that the only remedy for love is to love more."

"I loved magic from the start, beginning with the stories my Russian grandmother told me. If "magic" was in the title of a book, I was bound to find it. In the world of fairy tales, the amazing is recounted in a matter-of fact tone, with the practical and the magical living side by side. One day there is a knock at the door, or a rose that blooms through the winter, or a spindle that must be avoided at all costs. It was the melding of the magical and the everyday that was most affecting to me as a reader, for the world I lived in seemed much the same. People you loved could disappear, through death or divorce; they could turn into heroes or beasts. My personal experience and my childhood reading left me longing for a world in which anything could happen, magic or not, on an ordinary day."

"That’s still the best reading experience: falling in love with a book I meet by accident."

"For me—and I think for most writers—you're a reader first and then it just happens. You so love it that you want to be part of it, and you start writing."

"Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think. (p59)"

"Even though laws have changed we still have so many social constraints and so many rules that we set for ourselves and that society sets for us. It’s very difficult still to be a woman."

"I just do the best I can to face what life brings. That’s the secret, you know. That’s the way you change your fate."

"I don’t think about rules when I’m writing – that’s the great thing about writing: it’s the one place in my life that I can do whatever I want."

"I start writing a novel with a question I need answered. Practical Magic addresses serious questions about the place of women in our society-questions that are as important, or more so, than they were twenty-five years ago. Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, the place of a woman in society has not moved forward as we had wished, then and now. There are still many of the same issues left to address: equal pay, childcare, healthcare, sexual assault. Magic may not be able to right these wrongs, but sisterhood just might. The years have only intensified the importance of telling women's stories, and doing our best to ensure that women who have been forced to be silent can speak and tell their own truths."

"He realized how little he knew of this world, but he knew this: If you could love someone, you possessed a soul. (p348)"

"Every now and then a crow would soar past with a gold ring or coat button in its beak, a shiny souvenir of murder. (p298)"

"Human lives were like quicksilver; let go and they vanished. But not this time. (p319)"

"If you are loved, you never lose the person who loved you. You carry them with you all your life."

"It was a wonder, a message that all things were possible, even in this cruel world. (p215)"

"the Germans had researched her family; they were very thorough after all, and they knew things about her grandfather that she herself didn't know. She would think of this in the camp they took her to after she was arrested, how little she knew about the person she loved most in this world. (p214)"

"You are the man I admired most of all, Julien would say to him if he could, if they were lying side by side watching the universe expand all around them. (p283)"

"That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This was what one must turn to when there was no other option."

"'Because of this what transpired between them was something they hadn't expected, it was almost as if they had fallen in love in a world where anything could happen and nothing was impossible. (p295)"

"What they held in common was their aloneness, and in time, thrown together, with no world other than their own, they grew close. (p103)"

""We must hope for the best," she told the girl. She might have said more if she'd had the freedom to speak her mind, but in her formation she hadn't been given the choice to confide what she felt. If she could do so there would have been much she would have said: how green the verdant countryside was, how bright the light had become, how grateful she was to her maker each and every minute, how the birds in the treetops could be heard even when the train rumbled by, how the first of the season's bees hit against the windowpanes as if searching for flowers, how absolutely marvelous it was to be in the world. (p72)"

"This is how it began, out of water, out of clay, out of air, when it was not expected, when it should have never happened, when no one else understood who she was. (p113)"

"Two brilliant colleagues who were now wearing rags, carrying their children on their backs, thinking of starvation rather than algebra. (p116)"

"The most she dared to wish for now was to live long enough to become a woman. (p46)"

"I didn't believe in writers block until I had it. After 9/11 I couldn't write and the way I got out of it was to read one of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury...(Why couldn't you write after 9/11?) AH: I was so depressed and hopeless about the state of the world. When I re-read Fahrenheit 451, a book about how important books are, I was reminded of the reason to write."

"I always think it helps not to think about anyone reading your work, but to write what you would want to read."

"She was finally here, in the place where she had found a future. Still, night after night, the past was with her. (p197)"

"If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you will never understand. But if you do believe, you may see it everywhere, in every cellar, in every tree, along streets you know and streets you've never been on before. In the world that we knew, Hanni Kohn saw what was before her. She would do whatever she must to save those she loved, whether it was right or wrong, permitted or forbidden. (first lines)"

"He wondered why it was only when you were at the end of your life that it was possible to view it with honesty and truth."

"“For me—as I think it is for a lot of women and girls—I felt that they were figures that had power, and I felt very powerless,” she said. “It was just very exciting and thrilling to think of a witch who didn’t care if she was portrayed as ugly—which of course, I felt like I was—or not beautiful enough or whatever, but still had power and didn’t need to be rescued.”"

"When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure."

"It is clear when reading about the Holocaust that evil exists. But what was less apparent to me until I began to do research (for "The World That We Knew") was how much good there also is in the world."

"For me, magic is reading and writing."

"He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say."

"Artists have themes that they go back to—that they are haunted by and obsessed with."

"The persecution of people who are different, whether it's women as witches, whether it's Jews, whoever it is, it always comes from the same place of being against anyone who's different. Fear of the other."

"I think it's bad for writers to think too much about what their themes are, or to over-intellectualize their own work. I think it is much better for readers to think about that. They are not defensive, so they usually understand it at a different level, a purer level. I don't want to understand it too thoroughly. I just want to do it."

"The weak are cruel. The strong have no need to be."

"What you dream, you can grow."

"I don't think it's a good idea to compare yourself to anyone. You are who you are and no one can write the way you do. I always want to tell that to young writers. The most important thing is to tell your story."

"No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way. (p84)"

"In "Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism," her contribution to the Signs collection, Alix Kates Shulman explains the premise of radical feminist consciousness raising: "The so-called experts on women had traditionally been men who. as part of the male-supremacist power structure, benefited from perpetuating certain ideas. ... We wanted to get at the truth about how women felt.. .. Not how we were supposed to feel but how we really did feel." As it turned out this was easier said than done, especially when the feelings in question were sexual."

"Other people’s judgments were meaningless unless you allowed them to mean something."

"I think that I always wanted to tell the stories of women who were not able to tell their own stories."

"Many of us know what it's like to try to escape a family legacy of one sort or another, only to discover that in the long run we carry our heritage with us no matter how far we might run."

"She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people. It was a talent, as it was a curse."

"I usually do start with setting. I try to build a fictional world, and then hope that the characters will walk into it."

"Witches are outsiders, and those among us who have been bullied and ostracized can relate to their plight. Part of our fascination with witches is that they are the only female mythic figures with power. These are women who don't need to be rescued by a prince or a king but, instead, can save"

"My inspiration for the novel came from my participation in the first national demonstration of the women’s liberation movement: the 1968 protest against the Miss America Pageant, in Atlantic City, that symbol of traditional white beauty standards. That protest brought women’s liberation to national attention for the first time."