Young Sally: He will hear my call a mile away. He will whistle my favorite song. He can ride a pony backwards.
Young Gillian: What are you doing?
Young Sally: Summoning up a true love spell called Amas Veritas. He can flip pancakes in the air. He’ll be marvelously kind. And his favorite shape will be a star. And he’ll have one green eye and one blue.
Young Gillian: Thought you never wanted to fall in love.
Young Sally: That’s the point. The guy I dreamed of doesn’t exist. And if he doesn’t exist, I’ll never die of a broken heart.

Sally: I feel like I’m never going to see you again.
Gillian: Of course you’re going to see me again! We’ll grow old together. It’s going to be you and me living in a big house… these two old biddies with all these cats. I bet we even die on the same day.

Sally: I dream of a love that even time will lie down and be still for.

Gary: Curses only have power when you believe them. And I don’t. You know what? I wished for you too.

Sally: And I don’t want them dancing naked under the full moon!
Aunt Jet: No, of course. The nudity is entirely optional. As you well remember!

Gary: Did you or your sister kill James Angelov?
Sally: Yeah, a couple of times.

Gillian: You ever put your arms out and spin really, really fast?
Antonia: She does it all the time.
Gillian: She does? Well, that’s what love is like. It makes your heart race. It turns the world upside down. But if you’re not careful, if you don’t keep your eyes on something still, you can lose your balance. You can’t see what’s happening to the people around you. You can’t see that you’re about to fall.

Gary: You’re saying what I’m feeling is just one of your spells?
Sally: Yeah. It’s not real. And if you stay, I wouldn’t know if it was because of the spell and… you wouldn’t know if it was because I didn’t want to go to prison.
Gary: Yeah, well… you know, all relationships have problems.

Sally: Can love really travel back in time and heal a broken heart? Was it our joined hands that finally lifted Maria’s curse? I’d like to think so. But there are some things I know for certain: always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder, keep rosemary by your garden gate, plant lavender for luck, and fall in love whenever you can.

• An unexpected issue that director Griffin Dunne encountered was the number of takes the lead actresses needed to complete each scene. Sandra Bullock would generally finish in two or three takes. However, Nicole Kidman had just spent the previous eighteen months working with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and was now used to doing seventy or eighty takes for a single scene.
• The small-town scenes were filmed in downtown Coupeville, Washington, a Victorian-era seaside port town on the south side of Penn’s Cove on Whidbey Island.
• The name of Sally’s botanical shop is “Verbena”. Verbena is a flowering plant long associated with divine and supernatural forces.
• According to co-writer Akiva Goldsman, the director’s cut was a darker take on the material. Due to Warner Bros.’ marketing and extensive editing, it ultimately became a different version. Goldsman lost his copy of the original cut.
• When Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet are leaving the post office, you can clearly see the name “Maria’s Island Post Office” on the wall behind them.
• The pool scene near the beginning of the movie with Nicole Kidman’s character is shot on the same set used for the pool scenes in Boogie Nights (1997).
• Production designer Robin Standefer created all the interiors for the home, leading to a new career as an in-demand interior decorator. Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor asked Standefer to remodel their home after watching the film.
• Based on the 1995 novel of the same name by Alice Hoffman
• Timothy Olyphant was only cast in the film Go (1999) after he was fired from this movie and replaced by Aidan Quinn. He ended up staying in the same LA hotel room that had originally been booked for him for Practical Magic while filming Go.
• According to Sandra Bullock in the commentary, in the scene where Gillian and Sally get drunk with their aunts, and they sling insults, the actresses actually got drunk. They were drinking some very bad tequila that Nicole Kidman brought.
• For the final scene with all the townspeople at the Owens home, the entire population of the town where filming took place was invited to show up in costume as townsfolk.
• The black dog that followed Sally’s husband, Michael, on the day of his death was no accident. According to several cultural traditions, a sign of impending death can take the form of a black dog known as a phantom black dog or a hellhound in folklore.