Quotes from Lev Grossman

The memories were safe, sealed forever in amber.

Guy lives in a fantasy world without junk food or cars or trans fats or TV and he's still fat. You had to admire his dedication to the cause.

Do you know, I had almost lost faith in the goddess? I almost stopped believing in Her. But I realized I had to become something. I had to take what was done to me and use it to make myself into what I wanted to be. And I wanted this. And when I called Her, the goddess came.

This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself

He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn't think what else to do.

She considered herself too smart to believe in things she had no evidence for, and that behaved in ways that violated every principle she'd ever observed or heard plausibly spoken about. And she considered herself too tough-minded to believe in things just because they made her feel better.

She hadn't even known they were volcanic, but now they were lobbing big seminal gobbets of lava all over their lower slopes, like a drunk prom queen puking on her dress. Shit was getting geological, yo.

Like wine, Provençal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. It concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief.

The quietness of it was weird: real fights happened without a sound track.

she was smart enough to know whose problem that was, and it wasn't hers.

Now all I can see is how simple he made everything sound. Reading the Fillory books you would think that all one has to do is behave honorably and bravely and all will be well. What a lesson to teach young children. What a way to prepare them for the rest of their lives.

There are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn't seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time - the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They'd have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves.

With maaaaaaaaaagic!

She become moody and depressed. She started wearing black and listening to the Smiths and reading Camus in the original whatever. Her eyes became interestingly pouchy and sunken.

The beginning, the laying down of the fundamentals, was always the worst part, which he supposed was why so few people did it.

Apparently if you're enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted.

Whoever that hermit was, he obviously despised his fellow man, and that meant he was OK in Eliot's book.

Nothing made you feel more like a fucking sorcerer than aviating under your own power. Yippee ki-yay, motherfuckers.

Based on what he had overheard, one of his classmates had placed second in the Putnam Competition, as a high school junior. He knew for a fact that one of the girls had managed to take over the plenary session of the national model UN and push through a motion sanctioning the use of nuclear weapons to protect a critically endangered species of sea turtle. This while representing Lesotho.

a silver statue of a bird that seemed to be twitching. "Poor little thing," he said, petting it with his large hands. "Someone tried to change it into a real bird, but it got stuck in between. It thinks it's alive, but it's much too heavy to fly." The metal bird cheeped feebly, a dry, clicking noise like an empty pistol. Fogg sighed and put it away in a drawer. "It's always launching itself out of windows and landing in the hedges.

Her white fox fur was coarse and smooth at the same time, and she made little yipping snarls every time he pushed himself deeper inside her. He never wanted to stop.

It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended.

He had finished his quest, and it had cost him everything and everyone he'd done it for. The equation balanced perfectly: all canceled out. And without his crown, or his throne, or Fillory, or even his friends, he had no idea who he was. But something had changed inside him too. He didn't understand it yet, but he felt it. Somehow, even though he'd lost everything, he felt more like a king now than he ever did when he was one. Not like a toy king. He felt real.