“Cordelia loved his explanations. She loved knowing words that belonged to things she'd never seen, even to things you couldn't see at all. She remembered those words carefully. "Magic," George had said, "is something unnatural, something that doesn't really exist. If I snap my fingers and Othello suddenly turns white, that's magic. If I fetch a bucket of paint and paint him white, it isn't." He laughed, and for a moment it looked as if he felt like snapping his fingers or fetching that bucket. Then he went on, "Everything that looks like magic is really a trick. There's no such thing as magic." Cordelia grazed with relish. "Magic" was her favorite word - for something that didn't exist at all.”

“That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?”

“Stairs," Valkyrie said, disappointed."Not just ordinary stairs," Skulduggery told her as he led the way down. "Magic stairs.""Really?""Oh, yes."She followed him into the darkness. "How are they magic?""They just are.""In what way?""In a magicky way."She glared at the back of his head. "They aren't magic at all, are they?""Not really.”

“Then he paused, and I could tell that whatever he was going to say was really important. There was even a chance he might use more than five words to say it. "Or maybe your magic isn't destructive after all. The rain of Doritos, the bed things, this...Maybe it's just that you create too big, you know?"When I could find my voice, I said, "Cal, that might be the nicest thing anyone's said to me since we got here."He twirled one of the naked roots between his finger and didn't meet my eyes. "It's true." The he glanced up and gazve one of those half smiles I was really starting to like.”

“There's always a but. It's a magical word. You can say anything you want, go on for as long as you want, and then all you have to do is add the magic word and instantly everything you said is erased, turned meaningless, just like that.”

“It was as if she saw him in a whole new way, as if he had magically been transformed into a new person. Perhaps what she could really see, or wanted so very much to see, was how much he cared for her. Not that he wanted something from her, but that he wanted to see to it that she was happy, that she was taken care of, that that was what he truly wanted. And in that instant, it made her love him.”