“The Witch was so stunned that she nearly lost her grip on the branch. The last thing she ever cared for was gossip. Yet she had been out of touch for so long that she was astonished at the vigorous opinions of these random nobodies.”
“I think (and Digory thinks too) that her mind was of a sort which cannot remember that quiet place at all, and however often you took her there and however long you left her there, she would still know nothing about it. Now that she was left alone with the children, she took no notice of either of them. And that was like her too. In Charn she had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical.”
“She was a witch; and when she bewitched anybody, he very soon had enough of it; for she beat all the wicked fairies in wickedness, and all the clever ones in cleverness.”
“We went once that week to see Mama in Salem Prison. It was such a terrible place that Mary and I wept openly. But Mama was so busy attending to the other women that she could not abide our tears.”
“They moved away from her and left her alone in her pew. I could not bear it, so I bade Mary stay in our pew and went to sit beside her. I held her hand. She was trembling.”
[…]
”‘Friend of witches,’ they hissed at me when I left,” Mama recounted. “Oh, I shall never forget it.”
“The elders are looking for someone to blame. We will give them many someones.”
“You will give forth the names of people as witches? When you know you girls are not really afflicted?”
“We will, and the elders will be glad to know that the cause of the bickering and trouble in this place lies not at their own feet but is the fault of witches living amongst us.”
“The other possibility is that there are witches out there, hiding somewhere, plotting their revenge, liberally applying fireproofing compounds to themselves. And someday they may reappear and start causing trouble. And then what will our high and mighty scientists do? Throw calculator at them? Witches eat calculators.”
“Children are foul and filthy!” thundered The Grand High Witch.
“They are! They are!” chorused the English witches. “They are foul and filthy!”
“Children are dirty and stinky!” screamed The Grand High Witch.
“Dirty and stinky!” cried the audience, getting more and more worked up.”
“Although all the people in town talked about her in whispers, they all went to see her if they had troubles. Even the priest and the sister of the convent went, because Strega Nona did have a magic touch.”
“Each of them had brought something to put in the cauldron. This is what they put in: a frog, a beetle, a worm, a bat and a spider. They all stirred the cauldron as they chanted their spell.”
“Seven hearts the journey make. Seven ways the hearts will break ...”
The witch Sheba’s prophecy is like a riddle. A riddle Rowan must solve if he is to find out the secret of the Mountain and save his home. To the sturdy villagers of Rin, the boy Rowan is a timid weakling. The most disappointing child ever.
“The kids in Room 207 became very discouraged. It seemed that Miss Nelson was never coming back. And they would be stuck with Miss Viola Swamp forever. They heard footsteps in the hall. ‘Here comes the witch’, they whispered.”
“Cat Chant admired his elder sister Gwendolen. She was a witch. He admired and clung to her. Great changes came about in their lives and left him no one else to cling to.”
″... Gwendolen was a witch, so she could not drown. And Cat, who flung his arms around Gwendolen when the boat hit the post, survived too. There were very few other survivors.”
“Winnie can’t find her cat Wilbur in her house, because both her house and Wilbur are black. So she uses magic to turn Wilbur into a variety of colours, each one of which leads to a variety of mishaps and makes Wilbur miserable. In the end, Winnie turns Wilbur back to his original color and changes the color of her house instead. ”
“The noise was glorious. Ramona yelled and screamed and shrieked and chased anyone who would run. She chased tramps and ghosts and ballerinas. Sometimes other witches in masks exactly like hers chased her, and then she would turn around and chase the witches right back.”
“Even at a safe distance, this manuscript was challenging me- threatening the walls I’d erected to separate my career as a scholar from my birthright as the last of the Bishop witches.”
“Everything about the school was dark and shadowy. There were long, narrow corridors and winding staircases- and of course there were the girls themselves, dressed in black gymslips, black stockings, black hob-nailed boots, grey shirts and black-and-grey ties. Even their summer dresses were black-and-grey checked.”
“Katherine Tyler, though art here accused that not having the fear of God before thine eyes thou hast had familiarity with Satan the grand enemy of God and man, and that by his institution and help thou hast in a preternatural way afflicted and done harm to the bodies and estates of sundry of His Majesty’s subjects, in the third year of His Majesty’s reign, for which by the law of God and the low of the Colony thou deservest to die.”
“It was hard to beg humbly from a witch; and when she answered, ‘No, dear, I’m not going out this afternoon,’ harder still to conceal hot tears of rage- rage and disappointment.”
“Did the slave-woman dream (asks the cat) or did a witch truly take her baby? And, if a witch truly came, did the witch tell the truth, or did she take the baby, roast it, and eat it at a witches picnic?”