Quotes from Lev Grossman

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. He

Tomorrow I'll take you out to see the gold beetles. They're amazing: they eat dirt and poop out gold ore.

The year I graduated from college was the year Richard Linklater released Slacker and Douglas Coupland published Generation X . A quarter-century later it's hard to recover a sense of how radical and powerful those works were at the time, but to me they felt authentically contemporary in a way that nothing else did.

Sometimes I think I am fate's sword. She wields me cruelly." Quentin wondered what it was like to be so unselfconsciously melodramatic. Nice, probably. "Right.

He'd thought he'd known what his future looked like, but he'd been mistaken. His life would be something else now. He was starting over, only he didn't think he had the strength to start over. He didn't know if he could stand up.

I got my heart's desire, he thought, and there my troubles began. "We

was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you—he

he'd fantasized about having nothing to do except lie on his bed and sleep and stare into space, but now those empty hours were here, and they were getting old amazingly fast.

If being a hero is a matter of knowing your cues, like the fairy tale said, he'd missed his.

Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place. They

You only had to see a unicorn lay open the side of a centaur once, the ribcage flashing white when the ripped skin flopped down, to swear a mighty oath never to fuck with or even look at another unicorn again. I'm putting down the hearts and fluffy clouds and backing away slowly. Don't want any trouble here. You can have all the rainbows.

He was asked to draw a rabbit that wouldn't keep still as he drew it—as soon as it had paws it scratched itself luxuriously and then went hopping off around the page, nibbling at the other questions, so that he had to chase it with the pencil to finish filling in the fur. He wound up pacifying it with some hastily sketched radishes and then drawing a fence around it to keep it in line.

Afterward she took the tree aside and conferred with it privately.

She was a goddess of darkness as well as light. A Black Madonna: the blackness of death, but also the blackness of good soil, dark with decay, which gives rise to life.

Most of the students, and probably the faculty, were ambivalent about the whole idea of Disciplines. They were socially divisive, the theory behind them was weak, and everybody ended up studying pretty much the same curriculum anyway, so what was the point? But it was traditional for every student to have one, so a Discipline every student would have. Alice called it her magic bat mitzvah.

You sound just like my parents. That is just exactly what my ignorant Christian parents would say. Just, if it doesn't fit with your theory, well, that's just because, oh, it actually does, but God is mysterious, so we can't see it. Because we're so sinful. That's so fucking easy.

If this was madness it was an entirely new kind of madness, as yet undocumented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She had nerdophrenia. She was dorkotic.

Personal violence did not come naturally to Eliot; in fact he had found it distasteful. What could he say, he was a sensitive individual, fate had blessed and cursed him with a tender heart.

But perfection is a nervy business, because the moment you spot the tiniest flaw it's ruined. Perfection

She just assumed that everybody shared her desire for everybody to be clear on everything, and she'd expect you to do the same for her.

But I'm sorry, where did you think you were, motherfucker? Connecticut? You're in a magic safe house in Bed-Stuy, borough of Brooklyn. There was a considerable Venn diagram overlap between people who lived in Bed-Stuy and people who had motherfucking guns. Fool.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

It was a shock to see them go,

Now that he was teaching Quentin could see why the faculty didn't bother trying to improve the climate. It kept people amazingly focused. … You could actually watch as the determination to seize the moment and live life to the fullest ebbed right out of them, and they resigned themselves to lonely, silent, indoor study instead.