A Discovery of Witches: A Novel (All Souls Trilogy, Book 1)

This was true magic, the making and unmaking of the world with paper and ink.

He will rebel against the laws of the Creator – especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, – and so to the Machine (or Magic).

He was a strange creature, my selkie. When he was on land he longed for the sea; when he was in the sea he longed for the land. And is that not given to us all, to long for what we never can fully hold? Sometimes, love is like that. Sometimes, love can only exist while balancing, like angels, on the head of a silver pin.

And so I discovered that the practice of magic was not unlike the practice of history. The trick to both wasn’t finding the correct answers but formulating better questions.