To be honest, Quentin felt superior to anybody who still messed around with magic. They could delude themselves if they liked, those self-indulgent m… - Lev Grossman

In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster.

You know what Arthur C. Clarke said about technology and magic, right? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Turn it around. What is advanced magic indistinguishable from? Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from the miraculous.

Religion had never been a subject that interested Julia. She considered herself too smart to believe in things she had no evidence for, and that behaved in ways that violated every principle she’d ever observed or heard plausibly spoken about. And she considered herself too tough-minded to believe in things just because they made her feel better. Magic was one thing. With magic you were at least looking at reproducible results. But religion? That was about faith. Uneducated guesses made by weak minds.