The Once and Future Witches

That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.

One witch you can laugh at. Three you can burn. But what do you do with a hundred?

Behind every witch is a woman wronged.

I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared.

Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it.

She knows that history digs a shallow grave, and that the past is always waiting to rise again.

Because it's easy to ignore a woman." Juniper's lips twist in a feral smile. "But a hell of a lot harder to ignore a witch.

Or perhaps for all of them: for the little girls thrown in cellars and the grown women sent to workhouses, the mothers who shouldn’t have died and the witches who shouldn’t have burned. For all the women punished merely for wanting what they shouldn’t

Bella informs her that this is the precise reason why women's dresses no longer have pockets, to show they bear no witch-ways or ill intentions, and Juniper responds that she has both, thank you very much.

She thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite, and there are more people to catch you when you fall? What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?

The trick to doing something stupid is to do it very quickly, before anyone can shout 'wait!

We may be either beloved or burned, but never trusted with any degree of power.

But all the caring was beaten and burned out of her, and now she's just hate with a heartbeat.

maybe trust is neither lost nor found, broken nor mended, but merely given.

witchcraft isn’t one thing but many things, all the ways and words women have found to wreak their wills on the world.

It's a risk just to be a woman, in my experience. No matter how healthy or hardworking she is.

Books and tales are as close as she can come to a place where magic is still real, where women and their words have power.

In the stories, it’s generally best to do whatever the hell the talking animal tells you.

The Constitution? What, exactly, do you think the Constitution is? A magic spell? . . . I assure you it has only ever been a piece of paper, and it has only ever applied to a very few persons.

Seems to me they're the same thing, more of less. Witching and women's rights. Suffrage and spells. They're both...They're both a kind of power, aren't they? The kind we aren't allowed to have.

But she also knows there are times when every choice is a losing one, when you just have to go in swinging and hope you make it out alive.

A witch is just a woman who wants too much

She didn’t think throwing down the tyranny of man would take so many meetings, but apparently it does.

Men really ought to try offers of fealty rather than flowers.

That temper will get you burnt at the damn stake, Mama Mags used to tell her. A wise woman keeps her burning on the inside.

There's still no such thing as witches. But there will be.

The Calamitous Coven.” “No.” “Eve’s Army.” “No! It ought to be about, I don’t know, sisterhood or union—” “The Ladies Union of Giving the Bastards What’s Coming to Them.

What are?” Juniper’s eyes reflect the bronze shine of Saint George’s standing in the square. “Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both…” She gestures in midair again. “They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we aren’t allowed to have.” The kind I want, says the hungry shine of her eyes.

Don’t forget what you are. Everything.

She’d been so taken by him, so seduced by the admiration in his eyes. But she should have known no man ever loved a woman’s strength—they only love the place where it runs out. They love a strong will finally broken, a straight spine bent.