Magical Thinking Quotes

Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.

~ Augusten Burroughs

We should be cautiously open to the spiritual and non-rational, and skeptical of the more invisible magical thinking—what we might call “magical reason”—pervading secular thought and experience in modern society. Science and technology are for most people a new religion, and their orthodoxies are believed with the same fervor.

~ David Watson

She believed in magic—the magic of places, the magic of people, the magic of coincidences, serendipity, and fortune. She enjoyed wandering through the world with the open mind and curiosity of a four-year-old child. In her world the mystical, mythical, and magical inhabited the same space and time as the ordinary and the practical. At Bethesda Terrace, she always felt close to a source of magic and creativity. It was as if she was tapping into the place where dragons, angels, gods, sorceresses, and demons came to life.

~ Jamie Le Fay

There was no need for a term like ‘magical thinking’ in the Golden Age of Man...there was only genuine everyday magic and mysticism. Children were not mocked or scolded in those days for singing to the rain or talking to the wind.

~ Anthon St. Maarten

It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating based on their actions when in fact the rewards are randomly awarded. People will latch onto any seeming success and repeat it, even when they have to explain repeated failures as well. It appears practically impossible, or at least very rare, for humans not to be influenced by immediate experiences of concrete results. This is true even if the experiences turn out to have limited theoretical validity. The moment of surprise is not when people repeat alchemical failures but when they begin to do something else.

~ Naomi Janowitz

If I shut everything else out and filled the room with memories, the past could become the present, and I could live there, with him. I would never leave.

~ Na

In supernatural horror stories, however, magical thinking is a completely different matter. Those characters contending with what seems to be the work of magic will deny till the very last moment that anything magical is going on. They will invoke reason and evidence and eek out corroborations for the cause of their problems. But readers of these stories are rarely, if ever, on the side of these characters. They desperately want to believe that there is indeed something magical going on and they are primed to accept it whenever it occurs. Some readers especially enjoy a story with bad magic, as it assures them that magic is confined to fiction and will not leak into their real lives. This is the most perverse form of magical thinking and the one least likely to be recognized as such.

~ Thomas Ligotti