“Houdini used to pull rabbits out of a hat, but he never tried to make a living out of selling them when he had pulled them out of the hat”

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 3
Context: Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: What I would prefer to have is to have a kind of magic where we say, "OK, we’re going to do a magical performance on this night, at this time. You come along, if you don’t think it’s magical, that’s fine. We’ll show you. We’ll show you what we mean, and you judge for yourself." That’s only fair. So a lot of the magic we do tends to gravitate toward the practical end, toward something that is tangible. Where you’ve got a record at the end of it, a performance at the end of it, a painting at the end of it. You’ve conjured some energy, some idea, some information from somewhere and put it in a tangible form. You conjure something into existence in a literal sense. A rabbit out of a hat. Something out of nothing. That’s one level to it, but there’s a lot of background to that. That’s the stuff that people see, that’s the end result of the process. But we also do a lot of ritual work purely on our own.

The Ten Commandments

Malcolm Young, from Bonfire album notes.
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As quoted in "Kate Bush Speaks" by Owen Myers in Fader (23 November 2016) https://www.thefader.com/2016/11/23/kate-bush-interview-before-the-dawn

Source: Dreamland (2000)

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 11, Tammany Leaders Not Bookworms

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Source: A Visit from the Goon Squad