Magical Realism Quotes

“Would you teach me, Seth?’
Seth smiled and leaned back in his seat.
‘You do realise, of course, that you have no idea what you ask of me?’ Seth replied after a moment.
‘Of course,’ Christopher replied quietly. ‘Could you tell me?’
‘No. That is the problem you see,’ Seth said. ‘Magic is something you can never prepare someone for. Magic will make you, Christopher. It will find all the secret empty places of longing in you and fill them more surely than any other love. And magic will break your heart.’ A slight, rather sad smile crossed Christopher’s face for a moment. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You think your heart is already broken, you think that this crooked and winding way is the only path left for you now. But you’re wrong. The heart breaks like every wave on the beach and there’s a darkness you’ll have to pass through that you can’t even see from where you are now.”
― Lee Morgan, Wooing the Echo: Book One of the Christopher Penrose Novels

“Apparently, we're all in the frame," I heard Harry murmur somewhere behind me. And I whirled back to him. Innate, irrational anger surged. Then stopped, dead - as I suddenly took in Handsome, Robert and Doc. They were all staring at me. They were concentrating, all resolute, all a tad furrow-browed… upon my face.
Self-consciousness burgeoned. I gingerly fingered my and lips and my chin,
"Am I drooling?"
"Your arse is hanging out," said Harry, not looking up from the forensics he was scanning.
And so it was.
Handsome, Robert and Doc averted their eyes as I, wishing I'd merely been dribbling, grabbed the back flaps of my breezy hospital gown, fully placed my back against the wall. Then, thinking better of it, dived hurriedly, carefully, back into bed.
If Chinese Lady'd been here, she could've, would've, told me.
I missed her already.”
― Morana Blue, Gatsby's Smile

“Y cuando te estés secando, recordarás a la vieja y a la joven que te sonrieron, abrazadas, antes de salir juntas, abrazadas: te repites que siempre, cuando están juntas, hacen exactamente lo mimo: se abrazan, sonríen, comen, hablan, entran, salen, al mismo tiempo, como si una imitara a la otra, como si de la voluntad de una dependiese la existencia de la otra.”
― Carlos Fuentes , Aura

“Sleep: the moon still hasn't moved the width of a constellation since you were a girl. Since you have become a woman, the stars that stand above the halls of Palladios have not yet disappeared behind the domes of San Marco. But only since then has the world become the world.”
― Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Mars in Aries

“When everything is said and done, the only thing that really matters is the quality of the soul you build during the life you're given.”
― Kayt C. Peck

“The Waverley sisters had married men as steadfast and normal as the women were mercurial and strange.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

“Half asleep, he wondered whether that might not have been his happiest day ever, the last, perfect day swelling with the immensity of his secret intent, secret creation—the day before everything changed—the day before he realized, for the first time, yet with absolute finality, just how small his private immensity really was when measured against that other vast, dark, impersonal immensity, call it God, or history, or simply life.”
― Olga Grushin, The Line

“We prayed the moon would unstopper long enough to suck us through to the other side so we could see how dull the stars were at their backsides.”
― Lindsay Hunter, Daddy's

“I wanted to kiss you for a long time, and I decided that might be my only chance. I’ve been miserable ever since.” Troy ran his fingers along her jaw. “It was almost better when I didn’t know how it felt to kiss you.”
― Cindi Madsen, Cipher

“When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“He is looking down into the toilet bowl. He sees a bright shiny red ball, about the size of his fist, covered with blood and bobbing jauntily in the yellowed water. It throbs in time
with Ernest’s pulse. It is his heart.”
― J. Mulrooney, The Day Immanuel Kant was Late: Philosophical Fables, Pious Tales, and Other Stories

“And he told Stink about a saint he had tempted a thousand generations ago. Satan had mocked the Enemy’s ridiculous claim of omnipotence. “Does God have the power to make a rock so big that he cannot move it?” Satan asked. The saint looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “And then He would pick it up.”
― J. Mulrooney, The Day Immanuel Kant was Late: Philosophical Fables, Pious Tales, and Other Stories

“The young doctor was disappointed: he had never had th eopportunity to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he understood in an instant from the young man's blush and Andean accent that he was probably a recent arrival to the city. He said: "There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance one of these days." And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remeber, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice. "And when you do find one, observe with care," he said to the intern: "they almost always have crystals in their heart.”
― Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

“For these were the days when Time was still the horizon of beauty and had not yet begun its slow inexorable destructions.”
― J. Mulrooney, The Day Immanuel Kant was Late: Philosophical Fables, Pious Tales, and Other Stories

“That, too, was in the air itself -- a whisper of apology when the smell of the soil carried. There should be pumpkins in the fields, or sunflowers, or the peppers you saw up north. Instead, it was the smell of old earth that the breezes caught, sometimes a tinge of death. Too hard to forget.”
― Christian Crews, Hungry for Winter

“He hadn't moved. All the crazy-hot activity in the kitchen—waitresses going in and out, cooks going back and forth, the constant thump of barbecue being hand-chopped—and he was so still. She had to quickly turn away. Staring at an Alexander man too long was like staring at the sun. The image became imprinted. You could close your eyes and still see him.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon

“We write the earth we stand upon.”
― Laura K. Cowan

“+Dikkatli olun beyefendi, o evde adam öldürürler.
-Aşk uğrunaysa ziyanı yok.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping? Is an electron a wave or a particle? Slipstream tells us that the answer is yes.”
― James Patrick Kelly John Kessel, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology

“People from the mainland, particularly those from the capital, have always wanted to get married on Finø. Perhaps it has to do with the inherent difficulty of standing on Blågårds or in Virum and vowing to remain together forever when all you can see around you is evidence to the effect that one should be lucky indeed if all the things people promise each other last until Wednesday. But it is so much easier on Finø, surrounded by the half-timbered cottages from the eighteenth century, and the medieval Finø Monastery and hordes of faithful storks, and where the tourist brochure will tell you that Finø's primeval landscape remains untouched with its mulberry trees and polar bears, and Hans in local costume, and Dorada Rasmussen's colorful parrot.”
― Peter Høeg, The Elephant Keepers' Children

“Rejoice in the colours…”
― Michelle Frost, First Light

“(OSCAR - – -) “When you become sensitive to forces outside and inside yourself, you become sort of a light to others in this world and beyond. It is at this stage that you become very vulnerable to your own vices and weaknesses. The thing that lives under the bed is real—it always has been and it always will be. Walls can’t stop it. Concrete can’t stop it, steel can’t stop it; it slips past a lead, titanium, or garlic buffer like a hot knife through butter. The one and only force that can stop it is you. You never have to take delivery on any package in this realm or others if you remember that they always need your signature. You have the power to stop all of this if you choose, and you should always do so until you find out the entities’ purpose and motives. You are the sentry of your own mind and body, so challenge whomever or whatever wants to come to visit. If it’s beneficial and loving, it will wait or recede until you are ready. If it’s not at all friendly, you and only you have the power to send it back to where it came from, until you give up the right. The strong will eat the weak. What the weak have to remember is that power is a choice given to all. Die on your feet or die on your knees, you decide … death will come to all.”
― D.R. Schervish, The Mayhem Wrangler

“A few casualties always come with the war,” Zadok answers.

I stare at him for a moment, caught off-guard by his merciless approach. “I doubt you’d say the same if you were one of them.”

He looks at me with tired eyes. “That’s where you’re wrong.” His whole body sags, finally showing what age has done to him. “My whole family was a casualty at the Baghdad institute. My parents helped found it. It was the first institute to be targeted by its own government. They went down with it. I was twenty-five. The Jerusalem institute sent help as soon as they found out, before the Iraqi government could search the ruins. I was the only person they found still remotely close to being alive.”

His gaze looks lost as he continues. “It took me three years to recover, and four to become a carrier again. It took me that long to re-master my fear of being out of control.” His eyes shift to mine. “Don’t accuse me of not understanding the cost of this war. I understand plenty. I give myself up for it every day.”
― C.R. Beck

“The battle rages everyday.
In the Arena of God”
― Brian Oldham, The Arena Of God: The Gideon Jones Chronicles

“The problem with happiness is that it’s a difficult thing to detect. It’s discreet and serene by definition. Just when you think you’ve found it, it’s likely just a spark of euphoria, as quick and fleeting as fireworks. Human beings are therefore doomed to feeling happy without knowing it or experiencing brief and unstable glimmers of euphoria. There aren’t many people who have the tantric ability to fully experience happiness, detached from the bliss of euphoria.”
― Andre Averbug, The Drifting Self