Quotes from Lev Grossman

The problem was that Julia was smart, and Julia was interested in the truth. She didn't like inconsistencies, and she didn't let go until they were resolved, ever.

If you please, Admiral, don't be a cock. I'll know it when I see it, and if, for some reason, I don't, you tell me, alright?" Admiral Lacker inclined his head almost imperceptibly to indicate that they had a deal. He would endeavor to be as little of a cock as possible.

Plum guessed it stood to reason that out of all these billions of books at least one of them had to be dragon porn.

They went around the room telling stories about how they'd gotten here. No two were exactly the same, but there was always a certain family resemblance. Somebody went looking for a lost ball in an alley, or a stray goat in a drainage ditch, or fallowed an inexplicable extra cable in the high school computer room which led to a server closet that had never been there before.

Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn't get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

All of human literature could just be a user's guide to the multiverse!

Both their attention and their neglect were equally intolerable. His world had become complicated and interesting and magical. Theirs was mundane and domestic. They didn't understand that the world they could see wasn't the one that mattered, and they never would.

Fuck it, it was stupid. Theories about life were always bullshit.

He was going to be a motherfucking Magician.

But you know how there's a certain kind of person - and it's different for everyone - but suddenly when you see them your eye just snags on them, you get caught and you can't look away, and you're ten times more awake than you were a moment ago, and it's like you're a harp string and somebody just plucked you?

Alone in his room, he smiled at his secret greatness.

That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog. To tell you the truth I'm kind of glad he hit you.

Up through around twenty-five he'd never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand.

What is written with a sword cannot be erased.

these were authentically coarse-woven curtains, woven by people who didn't know any other way of making curtains, who didn't even know that their way was special, and whose way was therefore not discounted and emptied of meaning in advance. This made him very happy. It was as if he'd been looking for these curtains forever, as if he'd been waiting his whole life to wake up one morning in a room in which those coarse-woven, stem-green curtains hung over the windows.

More lies. But what could you do? That's how you roll when you're a teenage magician!

She didn't mind if she died trying. Suicide was in everything she did now, and everything she thought. Suicide was her home: if she could find nothing else, then suicide would always have her.

And why not do the easiest possible thing? Because isn't that always the best thing?

Free Trader Beowulf—you had to be at least forty and a recovering pen-and-paper role-playing-gamer to get the reference, but it was apt. Google it.

But being in the middle of it, it wasn't that obvious.

Plover's words were like dried flowers, stiff and crumbling, crushed flat between pages, when we'd had the living, blooming blossoms all around

Life was good. It was funny how just when you thought you knew yourself through and through, you stumbled on a new kind of strength, a fresh reserve of power inside you that you never knew you had, and all at once you found yourself burning a little brighter and hotter than you ever had before.

Everyone was pretending to be bored to tears, or maybe they actually were, but Quentin wasn't. He was unexpectedly happy, though he instinctively kept it a secret. In fact he was so fully of joy and relief he could barely breathe. Like a receding glacier the ordeal of the Beast had left behind a changed world, jumbled and scraped and raw, but the earth was finally putting up new green shoots again.

Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.