Quotes from Lev Grossman

It would be like Prospero's island, but in a good way: not a country of exile, a model world, safe and peaceful and private. A magician's land.

Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering.

Every hangover feels like the worst hangover you've ever had, but this one was definitely a classic. One for the ages. He felt like all the water had been forcibly sucked out of his body, like an apricot in a dehydration chamber, and replaced with venom from an angry adder.

if you're too good too much of the time, people start to forget about you. You're not a problem, so people can strike you off their list of things to worry about.

He was finally on the other side, down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. He was going to sign the papers and he was going to be a motherfucking magician.

It was summer again, and the summer nights smelled like murdered grass and sounded like crickets fucking.

She started wearing black and listening to the Smiths and reading Camus

As soon as he seized happiness it dispersed and reappeared somewhere else. Like Fillory, like everything good, it never lasted. What a terrible thing to know.

It never failed to astonish him, then or ever, how much of the world around him was mysterious and hidden from view.

I thought about what time is, how we're broken every second, we're losing moments all the time, leaking them away like a stuffed animal losing its stuffing, until one day they're gone an we lose everything. Forever. And then, at the same time, we're gaining seconds, moment after moment. Every one is a gift, until at the end of our lives we're sitting on a rich hoard of moments. Rich beyond imaging. Time was both those things at once.

Blue screen of death: she'd crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.

That was the truth. And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her family asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.

He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping an uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters.

This is a feeling that you had, Quentin,' she said. 'Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many ever experience. That's where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.

The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world.

It wasn't a place of worship, they explained, with a note of whinnying condescension, but a community devoted to the most absolute possible expression, or incarnation--or perhaps realization was an even better word--of the incomprehensibly complex but infinitely pure sylvan values of centaurhood, which Quentin's fallen human brain could never hope to grasp. There was something distinctly German about the centaurs.

There's no getting away from yourself. Not even in Fillory.

he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first.

The librarian thought the problem was just that the right books weren't breeding with each other and proposed a forced mating program.

Well, look, I was angry. I don't think I commit a lot of gratuitous violence, but this was war, and he was a jerk, and I made a mess of him. I threw him through a couple of doors, and he cried like a fucking baby. You know what they used to write on cannons? The last argument of kings . I guess you could say magic is the last argument of queens.

His hair—cut your fucking hair already, you're not Alan Rickman—was lank.

A new thought happens and a new plant springs up. A feeling fades away and the plant dies. Some of the more common ones are always in bloom—fear, anger, happiness, love, envy. They're quite unruly, they grow like weeds. Certain basic mathematical ideas never go away either. But others are quite rare. Complex concepts, extreme or subtle emotions. Awe and wonder are harder to find than they once were.

Your magician self, that loopy doppelgänger, was always with you, tugging at your sleeve, whispering silently that your real life was a fake life, a crude and undignified and inauthentic charade that nobody was really buying anyway.

Onward and upward.