“You two are children almost grown. Your hearts have not hardened to the realities of the world. Your dreams have not fallen through your fingers. You still know hope.”

“There is no one way to be a magician any more than there is only one way to be human.”

“Never are we as honest as at night, alone with thoughts and nightmares.”

“Your whole life, you are told what is right and what is wrong. What you should do and what you should not do. What makes a good citizen and what makes a traitorous one. What happens, then, when you...”

“Is it ghosts that truly haunt us, or the memory of our own mistakes that we wish we could undo?”

“So many men and women I have wronged, reduced to ghosts and shades. They surround me, but I can never let them know I regret what I have cost them, both the living and the dead.”

“If in any quest for magic, in any search for sorcery, witchery, legerdemain, first check the human spirit.”

“It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful. ...”

“Magic or nature, they were much the same thing to Magnus.”