Education Quote by Dar Williams

Dar Williams sidesteps the cheap version of “magic” - the kind you’re supposed to either stumble into or buy as a lifestyle accessory - and plants it somewhere less marketable: in the work of paying attention. “Where does magic come from?” sounds like a child’s question, but her answer refuses the fairy-tale payoff. The sparkle isn’t the reward for learning; it’s embedded in the act itself.

The phrasing matters. She doesn’t say magic is knowledge, or mastery, or being right. She says it’s “in the learning,” which keeps the door open to uncertainty, half-formed understanding, and the humility of not being finished. That’s a deeply musicianly claim: art is repetition, listening, adjustment. The enchantment arrives when your brain clicks into a new shape, when the world gains another layer of meaning because you stayed with it long enough.

Subtextually, it’s also a quiet rebuke to cynicism. Adult life trains people to treat curiosity as naive and wonder as unserious. Williams argues the opposite: wonder is a skill, and learning is the practice that sustains it. In a culture that fetishizes innate talent and overnight transformation, she reframes “magic” as something earned through engagement rather than granted by fate. It’s motivational without being corny because it’s honest about where the glow actually lives: not at the finish line, but in the unfolding.