Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

You can’t beg the world to do what you want. You can’t ask it nicely. You must force the world. You must bend it to your will.

Reading the wrong book is almost worse than not reading any book at all,

You must make choices, or the world will make them for you.

You’ll look like this one day,” she said. “They hate us enough. Don’t hate yourselves, too.

A true witch does not fear change. She is in an eternal state of revolution.

Would you prefer me to be ashamed?” she asked. “My appearance is the least of my qualities.

Daughter, student, whore- they change you into whatever they need you to be. Choose for yourself. For once in your life.

Because we’re women,” Periwinkle said. “Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew—the one thing they all have in common is that they hate us. For hundreds of thousands of years,

Power is not a material possession that can be given. Power is the ability to act and that must always be taken, for no one will ever give that power to you. Those who have power wish to keep it, and those who want power must learn to take it.’

We were never girls. We were witches.

Our parents say the War is good. The president says the bomb is good. They tell us factories that poison the earth are good. They say drugs are bad, and burning draft cards is bad, and hippies are bad, and everyone who wants to stop the War and save the planet is bad. It’s brainwashing! Everything they say is bad is good, and everything they say is good is bad. So maybe we should stop marching along like a bunch of sheep and start thinking for ourselves.

Do not start anything you cannot finish. Intention matters. Accept anger, accept weakness, accept pain. As these cannot be avoided, turn them to your use. Use care, caution, and common sense in all that you do.

She knew she shouldn’t ask. She knew she stood in a puddle of gasoline and every word was a lit match falling from her lips.

Amanda, You look at life Through the eyes of a child, And I don’t know where you got them, And it’s making me very uncomfortable. Please, stop.

But,” Miss Parcae said, “power without mercy is cruelty. And isn’t that what you’re subjected to now?

She didn’t think things could get any worse, then she saw the sign. Welcome to Florida, it read. The Sunshine State.

But everything worth doing is accompanied by fear.

But for girls like us, down there at the Home, the devil turned out to be our only friend.

It isn’t too smart for a girl to be smart, her mom had always said. So she just made herself very, very small.

Maybe being a witch means you go to Hell but I don’t mind if it means I don’t have to go home.

She remembered her mom saying that when you got a gift that's all you got, but when you gave a gift you gave two, one to the other person and one to yourself.

she knew that all the magic the witches had ever done was only a pale imitation of what had happened here tonight. This was the Great Mystery that lay at the heart of all things. This was the miracle that passed all understanding. First there is nothing. Then there is.

Her pain felt bigger than the world, but she'd had a baby and she could endure anything.

Nothing in magic is gained by aiming straight for it. As in life, it is the failures that prove to be most valuable because it is in failure that you learn anything useful, about the world or about yourself.

Not always bound by blood, sometimes bound by affection. I contain the memories of mothers, and mentors, and teachers who were like mothers to me. We pass along our memories to another when the time comes for us to walk into that eternal wood that knows no winter. We pass along memories and lives in an unbroken string reaching all the way back to that temple on the hill, looking down over the river, where they came and left us offerings under the cypress-scented breeze. I am the last of the long, long line of Hecate, and now it’s time for someone else to carry the flame.

Every price must be paid. So why do the same people pay it, over and over again? Why do the same people always bleed?

A witch follows no rules and does nothing that does not please her. A witch is guided by her will alone, and if a law does not serve her desires she will ignore it. Rules make her yawn and guidelines bore her.

Those who have power wish to keep it, and those who want power must learn to take it.’