Magic To The Bone Quotes
"It was the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, and all I wanted was a decent cup of coffee, a hot breakfast, and a couple hours away from the stink of used magic that seeped through the walls of my apartment building every time it rained."
"Magic, like booze, sex, and drugs, gave as good as it got."
"Magic always takes its due from the user, and the price is always pain."
"Forget the fairy-tale hocus-pocus, wave a wand and bling-o, sparkles and pixie dust crap."
"Being six foot tall and the daughter of one of the most notorious businessmen in town got me enough attention."
"One of these days, when my student loans were paid off and I’d dug my credit rating out of the toilet, I’d be able to turn down cheap Hounding jobs."
"Sometimes when I use magic, it makes me pay the price in pain, then takes a few of my memories for good measure."
"I didn’t bother with alarm spells. Most single women in the city thought alarm spells would keep them safe, but I knew firsthand that if someone wanted to break into your apartment badly enough, there wasn’t a spell worth paying the price for that could keep them out."
"Magic was revolutionary, like electricity, penicillin, and plastic."
"And hey, who didn’t have a few memories they wouldn’t mind getting rid of, right?"
"It wasn’t like I had wanted to go to Harvard. I had Juilliard in mind: art, not business; music, not magic."
"True to the Beckstrom blood, I also had a gift for magic-based Influence. But after watching my dad Influence my mother, his lovers, business partners, and even me to get his way, I’d sworn off using it."
"Maybe it was a sick sort of kinship, knowing that other people were holding together while everything was falling apart too."
"I am reporting you and Beckstrom Enterprises to the authorities."
"But I could taste the honey-sweetness of magic and Influence behind his words, could smell the bitter tang of something that was not sincerity in his tone."
"I would happily endure fear and uncertainty, and even pain, if it meant I could live my life free from his manipulation."
"Memory manipulation was against the law, and deservedly so for how dangerous it was."
"He was good at magic, my dad. One of the best."
"‘‘Buy you lunch?’’ he asked. ‘‘Not hungry.’’"
"My whole body was stiff, and standing in the cold wasn’t making anything better."
"‘‘How about we get a cup of coffee?’’ I said."
"He missed the sky and grass and the wind and the sun. He missed the sun the most."
"‘‘You did a good job keeping our secret, Cody,’’ the Snake man said. ‘‘I’m proud of you.’’"
"‘‘Please,’’ Cody said. ‘‘Don’t hurt her. Please?’’"
"‘‘Good, Cody, good,’’ Snake man said. ‘‘I’m proud of you. You did a good thing.’’"
"‘‘It’s soup,’’ Zayvion said. ‘‘Beef and vegetable. Oh. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?’’"
"‘‘Nobody gets between me and fresh sourdough.’’"
"‘‘You might be a good Hound, Allie,’’ he said. ‘‘And you might have your dad figured out, but you got me all wrong.’’"
"‘‘You should go see a doctor, Allie,’’ he said softly."
"‘‘Hi, Al!’’ My best friend in all the world, Nola’s warm, happy voice piped out of the machine. ‘‘Happy birthday!’’"
"It wasn't like Nola was rolling in the dough. A hard rain at the wrong time could ruin a year's worth of work on a field, and the nonmagic eggs she raised didn’t make up for those sorts of things. This was a generous gift and I owed her big-time."
"The sweet smell of tobacco and charcoal, hinting of a wood fire down on the shoreline, wafted through the air."
"Sometimes I felt like a ghost in my own life."
"Instinct told me to run. Instinct told me he was dangerous."
"I could handle dangerous. Dangerous and me went back a long way."
"There wasn't a single way he could see me, standing behind a dark curtain, in a dark room, wearing a dark sweater and jeans."
"There weren’t a lot of people out on the street yet, which suited me fine."
"But there were other things, unspoken things, that drew me to him."
"Survival instincts said step away and leave the man alone. Something else, something deeper that was probably my heart, if I indeed still had one, told me to draw near and fold into the warmth of him."
"Lovely morning. The snap of cold air on my face, the sound of birds in the trees, the gut-wrenching joy of being stalked. It was great to be me."
"Shock is a strange thing. It’s a little like dreaming about breathing underwater."
"And all I could think was: so this is what it feels like to have a parent die."
"Move, Allie, I told myself. So I moved. Forward."
"Neat. Tidy. The entire life and death of a man who was a mystery I had never been able to puzzle out, summarized in a thousand words or less by a stranger."
"People die, sure. But not my dad. Never my dad."
"Hot, bitter to the point of being sharp. It was like a slap to the face, painful, but kind of good too."
"Magic can’t be cast in anger, or any other high emotion, including panic or fear."
"The great thing about childish tricks is that almost no serious adult ever expects them."
"How had my life suddenly gotten so complicated, and why hadn’t I just taken up knitting as a hobby?"
"I wasn’t his girlfriend, or at least I didn’t think I was."
"I’m not a cat person. Not that I hate cats or anything. It’s just that I have not been around them much."
"Even though I was breathing hard, and the kid wasn’t breathing nearly hard enough, I could smell the oil and dirt of the city, the salt and hickory of hot dogs getting the grill, the pineapple and smoke of chicken and teriyaki."
"I could smell something else too—the copper and lye of magic being cast, spoken, chanted, channeled, used, like a blanket that smothered the city, every crack, every brick."
"In my opinion, the fine line between advancement and addiction had been crossed years ago."
"Maybe I smelled enough like garbage, cat pee, and blood to hide in plain sight."
"What the hell was I was doing trying to dodge a Hound, get to the cops, and take someone to a hospital all on my own?"
"Magic could only be channeled by lead, glass, iron, and glyphs. And, apparently, me."
"Instead of darkness, I saw lines of magic that pulsed in jeweled colors, connected in contrasts of sharp angles, and softened like a watercolor."
"It wasn’t like I could make up a phony address. I really had nowhere to go except to Nola’s."
"The idea of my very careful father being touched, much less harmed, by the magic he had been so influential in regulating made zero sense to me."
"‘Money isn’t everything,’ I said. ‘Magic isn’t either. Sometimes people get confused about that. Sometimes even I get confused about that.’"
"I did like it better when we were joking instead of talking about serious things."
"I’m trying not to think about it too much, yet."
"I think you need to take a little time and figure out what you’re going to do next."
"I’m okay. I’m trying not to think about it too much, yet."
"It's hard to kill someone with magic. Takes an incredible amount of power, and intense focus and control."
"If you take a life, you have to give a life."
"Nobody can make magic into anything they want. There’s a limit to what magic can do, a limit to any user’s ability."
"Magic drives people to do things you can’t even imagine."
"You can’t just pluck magic out of the ground and make it do anything you want it to do. You have to study, learn the shapes it will accept, memorize the glyphs, mantras. It’s work—hard work—and it hurts if you do it wrong. It hurts even if you do it right."
"To just suck up a handful of magic and wave it at someone until they stop dying is impossible."
"Good people like you, like me, and maybe even Zayvion."
"It was pretty. Beautiful magic. And it made your chest stop hurting. Do you remember that?"
"I’d think a person would remember such a thing. I think I would remember it, memory loss or no memory loss. I would have felt it. I would have tasted it. It would still be in my hands, in my lungs."
"You always push away men at the first sign they might see that you’re vulnerable and use it against you. And you have rarely been right about that."
"This is going to revolutionize everything we know about and do with magic, Allie. This will put someone in a position of worldwide power and influence."
"I refuse to play a game of who gets to gnaw at the scraps of fat. Having tons of money—especially money made off of the misfortune of others—isn’t my ultimate goal in life."
"I’m not hurt—I’m thinking fast. Maybe Bonnie and Cody aren’t really gone. Maybe she’d just found some sort of way to confuse light so I couldn’t see them. For all I knew, they might still be standing right there in front of me."
"Magic filled my lungs, rose up my throat, poured out of my mouth, my ears, nose, eyes."
"Magic is a heartless bitch, and she’s had me by the throat for years."
"I tried to remember what we were talking about. Oh, yes. Healing."
"The last newspaper I read told me my father was dead."
"Grounding, or acting as a lightning rod for another magic user while they are using magic, was not an easy thing to do."
"But every time I steered the conversation to any time before he had worked for my stepmom, he neatly sidestepped the question."
"I am an ‘‘off’’ switch, I intoned to myself."
"I’d let him down pretty badly on that account."
"Magic collectors. Which meant this was a newer building, or maybe retrofitted."
"‘‘Is there anything else you haven’t told me?’’ he asked with a smile."
"I’d said before that I didn’t think there was a spell worth paying for that could keep a burglar out of your house if they were determined to break in. But I had never seen a spell so artfully cast as the one that covered Zay’s door."
"Because I am a snoopy bitch, I glanced in the bathroom—clean to the point of being sparse, very bachelor—but at least there was toilet paper on the roll."
"Magic cannot be cast from a state of confusion or high anxiety or emotion. I was burning with untapped power, and I couldn’t do a single thing."
"I wasn’t just a woman with magic. I was magic. Who needed a spell? I told the magic to make him stop, make him go away, make him not be there."
"Good. You have a great ability, Allie. It would be a shame to see you give it up."
"Well, since that line of inquiry is only getting me sarcasm, I’m going to change the subject. Why doesn’t my arm itch here?"
"‘What did you do to me, Cody?’ I muttered. ‘What did I do to myself?’"
"Listen, I like Nola and all that stuff she stands for, but I am not going to turn magic-free just because I got a little burn."
"Magic filled me and filled me, and like a dam filled too full, I broke."
"But I did not know how to stay. The storm was in me, taking me apart, pulling me away."
"We have plenty of time to straighten this out. Plenty."
"Heal or kill? I guess Zayvion had it right when we first met. I just didn’t have killing in me."