Has anybody ever told you’re a remarkably cynical person?”“I like to think of it as learning from experience.

— Benedict Jacka

I don’t sell spells, and I don’t sell tricks. I don’t carry illusions or marked cards or weighted coins. Furthermore, I can not sell you an endless purse or help you win the lottery. Furthermore, I can’t make that girl you’ve got your eye on fall in love with you, and I wouldn’t do it even if I could. Furthermore, I don’t have a psychic hotline to your dead relatives, I don’t know if you’re going to be successful in your career, and I don’t know when you’re going to get married. Furthermore, I can’t get you into Hogwarts or any other kind of magic school, and if you even mention those stupid sparkly vampires I will do something unpleasant to you.

— Benedict Jacka

If there’s one thing all diviners share, it’s curiosity. We really can’t help it; it’s just part of who we are. If you dug out a tunnel somewhere in the wilderness a thousand miles from anywhere and hung a sign on it saying, ‘Warning, this leads to the Temple of Horrendous Doom. Do not enter, ever. No, not even then’, you’d get back from lunch to find a diviner already inside and two more about to go in. Come to think about it, that might explain why there are so few of us.

— Benedict Jacka

I’ll use my divination and look into the future. Hey, you know what, I’m seeing the future right now. If I stand here and wait, then in three minutes a train’s going to come. And after that, another train’s going to come. Here, I’ll let you guess what’s going to happen afterward. I’ll give you a hint—there’s a train.

— Benedict Jacka

You’re lucky you didn’t know him back in his tech phase. There was this time in our second year when we were living in the same house. Kitchen table kept wobbling, so Lands shoved this metal saucer under one of the legs. Wasn’t until two weeks later we found out it was a land mine.

— Benedict Jacka