Quotes from Lev Grossman

And on and on, and it all sounded completely, horribly plausible. Any one of a thousand options promised - basically guaranteed - a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out? Why was he still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him? The professors Quentin talked to about it didn't seem concerned at all. They didn't get what the problem was. What should he do? Why, anything he wanted to!

Now he knew his way around a ward-and-shield or two. He could chuck a magic missile with the best of them. He was a damn one-man magic-missile crisis.

Plum's own romantic history so far had been pretty limited, with minimal drama. It was one area where she felt comfortable lagging behind her peers. But she prided herself on her powerful philosophical insights into other people's relationships.

In a way fighting like this was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.

The year since then had been peaceful and prosperous, and in some ways the mood was lighter in the castle with Josh and Poppy installed as King and Queen in place of Quentin and Julia, Fillory's brooders-in-chief.

Bzzt!" Eliot pressed an imaginary game-show button on the arm of the chair. "The answer I was looking for was, 'She's not my girlfriend, she's a crazy magic rage-demon.

Nothing made you look like more of a dick than standing there trying to find the end of your scabbard with the tip of your sword.

She was passionately loyal, and if she was obnoxious it was only because she was so deeply tender-hearted. It made her easily wounded, and when she was wounded she lashed out. She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

Until then he'd worked hard, but he got in his share of malingering like everybody else.

Half the mountains in the Northern Barrier Range had just erupted, blown their tops off like ripe pimples. 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.

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don't change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.

Julia didn't laugh. She understood that she was looking at another person like herself, a broken person, but Pouncy was even more broken than she was. She was used to feeling sorry for herself, and angry at other people. She was less used at feeling sorry for someone else, but she felt it now. She would never be in love with Pouncy, but she felt love for him.

He was unexpectedly happy, though he instinctively kept it a secret.

trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything. The

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

Wait a minute," Quentin said. "Who or what is the Thames dragon?" "The Thames dragon," Eliot said. "You know. The dragon who lives in the Thames.

a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.

He felt like he was coming back to life too. Not that he'd been dead, just ... not quite alive. Something else.

There were things he'd been scared to face his whole life, and now that he was looking them in the eye they weren't quite as scary as he first thought.

It was a worrying trend. Everybody else was deep into their own stories, and all the stories were woven together just beneath the surface into a web that included Plum. But what was Plum's story?

It was Italy after all. People probably hit each other all the time.

I've got no other home to go to, not anymore. When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won't live in a wasteland. I'd rather die in paradise.

Whether or not he was in it, whether or not he could see or touch it, he'd thought there would always be a FIllory out there somewhere. He loved knowing it was there. It anchored his sense of happiness, the way a distant stockpile of gold might underwrite the value of a paper bill.

It makes perfect political sense. We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.