9 Quotes by Pam Grossman

The witch owes nothing. That is what makes her dangerous. And that is what makes her divine. Witches have power on their own terms.

Books were my broomstick. They allowed me to fly to other realms where anything was possible.

To practice in a group requires both a loosening of self-consciousness and a tightening grip on the rudder of sincerity. You have to care, and you have to let others see you caring. And you have to bear witness to their caring in turn.

The witch is the ultimate feminist icon because she is a fully rounded symbol of female oppression and liberation.

When you’re a weird kid, you learn to put guardrails around the things you love. You keep them hidden heart-deep, lest someone try to take them, mock them, or co-opt them out of cruelty or just plain clumsiness.

How do you know if it is spirit or nature who answers? Maybe there is no difference at all. Maybe grace is green.

The witch is notorious shape-shifter and comes in many guises. More than anything, though, the witch is a shifting and shadowy symbol of female power and a force for subverting the status quo. She is also a vessel that contains our conflicting feelings about female power: our fear of it, our desire for it, our hope that it can and will grow stronger despite the flames that are thrown at it.

Magic is made in the margins.

Perhaps my favorite crone heroine of all time is Marian Leatherby, the deaf, toothless, ninety-two-year-old protagonist of The Hearing Trumpet, a novel written by Surrealist luminary Leonora Carrington. Marian sports a short gray beard that she finds “rather gallant,” and she has a dear geriatric friend named Carmella who states, “People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.