Quotes from Lev Grossman

One, your hair is stupid. And two, I don't know what it's like where you come from, but if you ever do anything that could get me sent back to Brooklyn again, I won't just break your nose. I will motherfucking kill you.

The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they'd begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.

Vile Father's brown nipples, on the ends of his pendulous man-cans, were like dried figs.

The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn't love?

I call the right axe Sorrow," she said. "You know what I call the left one?" "Happiness?" "Sorrow. I can't tell them apart.

That's how you roll when you're a secret teenage magician

Loosening his tie with one hand, Quentin stepped out into the cold clear winter air and flew.

You don't learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

would have to find something else, he thought mazily. Something new. Couldn't stay here anymore. Couldn't go back. Only forward.

Clouds in Fillory weren't clammy and disappointing the way they were in the real world, they brushed past you all warm and soft and cottony, just solid enough to be comforting. 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 wasn't time yet. You'll find it again, if you look hard enough.

Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.

The Deeper Magic always seemed to come up when Ember didn't feel like doing something, or needed to close a plot hole.

at least he could always remember it the way he wanted to. The memories were safe, sealed forever in amber.

You need to do more than memorize, Quentin. You must learn the principles of magic with more than your head. You must learn them with your bones, with your blood, your liver, your heart, your deek." He grabbed his crotch through his dressing gown and gave it a shake.

With the traditional Australian's indifference to personal dryness and venomous underwater predators, she dived right in.

Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.

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.

Maybe he was the anti-Santa, of the South Pole, and he was going to show them where the elves made lumps of coal for Anti-Christmas.

Even on the first day we invaded Plover's house we sensed the conundrum that Americans are faced with in England: they're too frightened of English people to behave rudely to them, and too ignorant to know how to behave politely.

Supposedly the Thames dragon wrote most of Pink Floyd's stuff. At least after Syd Barrett left. But there's no way to prove it.

Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it'll only turn you into a monster. Better to stay home and do card tricks in your bedroom instead.

Humbledrum farted mournfully, three distinct notes.

With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.