Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief. - Lev Grossman

Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic," Fogg said expansively. "It doesn't really make sense. It's a little too perfect, don't you think? If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don't change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.
"Little children don't know that. Magical thinking: that's what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

Is that God?" Poppy said.
"That is a god," Penny corrected her. "Though that is really just a term to describe a magician operating on a titanic power scale.

That’s when they turned to religion.
At this Julia pushed her chair back from the table. She could feel her intellectual gag reflex about to kick in.