Quotes from Lev Grossman

Her depressive tendency, the flip side of her manic streak, was stirring. Why were they even doing this? it wanted to know. What a waste of time, of effort. Of pencils. Plum needed to get moving, but she was having trouble attaching meanings to things; the meanings kept peeling off like old stickers.

The multiverse was his TGI Friday's.

June ripened into July, then burst and withered and dried and became August.

She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.

Welcome to Facelessbook: an antisocial network.

Age is wasted on the young. Just like youth.

Something must be going on deep in his subconscious, he thought, some kind of redecoration, refurbishment, reupholstering that required a lot of downtime - some shadowy application running in the background, performing unknown operations, consuming huge chunks of psychic ram.

He and Janet talked like this all the time. The Fillorians didn't really get it, they thought High King Eliot and Queen Janet hated each other, but the truth was that in Quentin's absence Janet had become his principal confidante. Eliot supposed it was partly because they both found real romantic intimacy elusive and kind of uninteresting, so usually neither of them had a serious boyfriend, and they had to turn to each other for intelligent companionship.

In real life humans didn't slay giants, because it was impossible. It would be like killing an apartment building with your bare hands.

For the true magician there is no very clear line between what lies inside the mind and what lies outside it.If you desire something, it will become substance. If you despise it, you will see it destroyed. A master magician is not much different from a child or a madman in that respect. It takes a very clear head and a very strong will to operate once you are in that place. And you will find out very quickly whether or not you have that clarity and that strength.

Everything people forget about ends up there one day, they said. Toys, tables, whole houses. And people end up there too. They get forgotten as well.

Sorry", Elliot said. "But you were kissing everybody else.

he imagined another life for himself as one of these silent scholars, buried in his research like a guinea pig in its wood shavings, nibbling away steadily after some arcane piece of knowledge in the hope of making an addition, however imperceptible, to the collective pile.

She was young enough that all she had to do was kid things, but she was also getting old enough that she wanted to do more than play games and pretend.

A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.

Quentin hadn't planned on spending the rest of his afternoon—or morning, or whatever this was—taking a standardized test on an unknown subject, at an unknown educational institution, in some unknown alternate climatic zone where it was still summer.

The lights were too bright, and there were too many TVs, but it was a bar, and that was another place, like bookstores, where Quentin felt at home. Drinks were a lot like books, really: it didn't matter where you were, the contents of a vodka tonic were always more or less the same, and you could count on them to take you away to somewhere better or at least make your present arrangements seem more manageable.

She swore she could prove it mathematically, but the calculations required were so involved that they would have required a computer the size of the universe, running for a length of time that would have taken them past the projected heat-death of the universe, to work them out. It was pretty much the definition of moot.

That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn't make excuses, and it was never funny.

And at that moment, out of nowhere, Janet knew that she herself would never have children. Probably she'd known it for a while, but it was the first time she'd admitted it to herself. Let others breed. Let them, and God be with them. She would be the witness—she was tough enough to see everything break and not break herself. They also serve who fly around on hippogriffs and watch.

The others were conspicuously silent, or talked among themselves, elaborately play-acting that they were unaware of the fact that Quentin was conversing with a drunk magic bear.

Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed. They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: James, Julia, and Quentin. James and Julia held hands. That's how things were now. The sidewalk wasn't quite wide enough, so Quentin trailed after them, like a sulky child. He would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone period, but you couldn't have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.

Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be.

We had problems, but we could have fixed them. But that was too easy for you. It might actually have worked, and then where would you be? You would have been stuck with me forever,