Magic Words Change as We Use Them

"Just as language will change as its speakers use it over decades and centuries, so the language that creates the world—the language that is the world—its Meaning, its Logos—can change as we use it, all of us human persons and others, and when it does the world in which we have our beings is remade."
—John Crowley, Daemonomania

In the Mouth of the White Squirrel

"But he found no word beneath the tongue of the reindeer, no magical word in the mouth of the white squirrel, not even so much as the beginning of a word."
—The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, 1922

Epigraphs as Magic Words

"On the next page the title again, and beneath it in small italics one of those little quotations ... many old books had, like a magician's distracting patter before his trick, more mysterious usually than the book that followed." —John Crowley, Love and Sleep

Thanks to Jim H. Moreno for naming our Magic Words: A Dictionary as a favorite resource for spell casting in fantasy role playing games.

Brumagem

“What was the word—the magic word? Brumagem—that was it—Brumagem. An enchanting word! . . . A word to be repeated over to himself softly and secretly at night at the same time as Damn and Corsets.” —Agatha Christie, Giant’s Bread (1930)

Handwritten magician's book, Batak Culture, Indonesia, 1800s. (Source)

A Novelist's Magic Words

"Like a conjurer, a novelist should be able to take the rabbit out of the hat without letting his audience in on the way in which he did it."
—John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews