Quotes from Lev Grossman

Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either.

Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it.

Nothing a recovering addict likes more than a tale of how bad it had been in the old days, and how low a fellow addict had sunk. Let the one-downsmanship begin.

The Order seemed to adhere to the principle of suckers walk, players ride.

Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.

He's so happy," Eliot said dryly. "It's like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change. There

Sometimes you just have to do things

At the moment when it had been at its most intolerably painful, the world, normally so unreliable and insensitive in these matters, had done him the favor of vanishing completely. Granted,

Fuck love, fuck marriage, fuck children, fuck fucking itself: this was his romance, this fantasy land at whose helm he sat, steering it on and on into the future, world without end, until he died and tastefully idealized statues were made of him. It was all he needed. It was all he would ever need.

It didn't feel like an exalted business—there was nothing grand about it. It hadn't felt noble and righteous, it felt rough and ugly and bloody and cruel. It was what was necessary, that was all.

When he saw Julia, he searched himself for the old love he used to feel for her. It wasn't gone, but it was a dull, distant ache, still there but healed over-- just the shrapnel they couldn't remove.

At this moment his dearest wish would have been just a moment's grace to immerse his face in a sinkfull of warm water. And maybe to have somebody hold him under till he drowned.

God, I hope we don't have to use that," was all he said out loud. "Oh, come on, Quentina. We're not looking for trouble. We just want to be ready if it comes." Josh could hardly contain himself. "Dungeons & Dragons, motherfucker!

He looked like a child who had been slightly misdelivered, with some subpar forceps handling by the attending.

you will, for just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.

It was about damn time something happened.

I've waited a long time for this," Penny said. "Then this is going to be kind of an anticlimax," Alice said, and she punched him in the face. Boom! Oh my God. It was beautiful, just like in a movie: straight from the shoulder, feet planted, hips rolled, follow-through, the works. Penny never saw it coming.

The bear, it emerged, drank only peach schnapps, which it sipped from delicate thimble-size glasses.

The past was ruins, but the present was still in play. They would have to tie him down to keep him from going to Ember's Tomb.

You hate yourself so much, you'll hurt anybody who loves you. That's it, isn't it? Just to get even with them for loving you.

infinite corridor of panic that led nowhere.

There must still be some last invisible unbroken strand connecting them, something deeper than mourning. The wound had healed but the scar wouldn't fade, not quite.

The higher you get the more you realize how much bigger than you everything is.