Quotes from Lev Grossman

He almost felt like he was betraying Julia. But what did he owe her? It's not like she even would have cared. And Professor Sunderland was here. He wanted somebody who was part of his new world. Julia had her chance.

Sabes lo mas divertido? Lo que es para partirse de risa? Que no es verdad, que ni siquiera lo quieres. Aunque todo esto terminase sin mas contratiempos, seguirías sin ser feliz. Te rendiste en Brooklyn y en Brakebills, y cuando llegue el momento también te rendirás en Fillory. Es lo más fácil, ¿verdad?

until sunlight came bleeding up over the horizon, like more acid blood oozing out of his sick ruptured heart, which felt - not that anybody cared - like a rotten drum of biohazardous waste at the very bottom of a landfill, leaching poison into the groundwater, enough poison to kill an entire suburb full of innocent and unsuspecting children.

Labyrinths were old sorcery, and subtle: good for recharging one's magical resources when they were running low.

And Quentin had never known how the Maze was redrawn over the summer, but apparently every year in June the groundskeeper goaded the topiary animals into such a feeding frenzy that they fell upon and devoured each other in a kind of ghastly slow-motion vegetarian holocaust.

He was going to sign the papers and he was going to be a motherfucking magician.

Plus, magic just doesn't feel like a tool. Can you imagine how boring it would be if casting a spell were like turning on an electric drill? But it's not. It's irregular and beautiful. It's not an artifact, it's something else, something organic. It feels like a grown thing, not a made thing.

Quentin wondered what heaven would be like for Penny. Probably in heaven you were always right and you never had to stop talking. God, he could be a dick where Penny was concerned. Probably in heaven you had hands.

He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world–he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly, humiliatingly, just to get one sip of air.

The world around her, the straight world, the mundane world, had become to her a blowing wasteland. It was empty, a postapocalyptic world: empty stores, empty houses, stalled cars with the upholstery burned out of them, dead traffic lights swaying above empty streets. That missing afternoon in November had become a black hole that had sucked the entire rest of her life into it. And once you'd fallen past that Schwarzschild radius, it was pretty damn hard to claw your way back out again.

She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future,

he was still in the real world, where bad, bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren't their fault.

He had an air of magnificent melancholy sophistication, as if his proper place were elsewhere, somewhere infinitely more compelling even than Brakebills, and he'd been confined to his present setting by a grotesque divine oversight, which he tolerated with as much good humor as could be expected.

Right. You might just think about climbing down from there." He was using that cautious tone you use when you're trying to reason with a cat.

Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.

Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he'd stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn't want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever. "Don't

Shit was getting geological, yo.

Privately Kate thought that for a guy in a banana-yellow suit he was turning out to be a pretty sharp operator.

Fresh tobacco. Black currants. God, it was so good. She kept it in her mouth for a count of ten before she swallowed. If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine. She smelled wet hay from a tumbledown field in Tuscany in the early morning, after the sky turned light, but before the sun burned off the dew.

I will stop being a mouse, Quentin. I will take some chances. If 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.

A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors.

Beer might help with that," Quentin said. He felt punchy. "This could be the next clue. If it's a talking beer, I mean a talking bear, we could, you know, talk to it.

I think you're magicians because you're unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. "Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But

The effect was of somebody reluctantly reading a prepared statement off a teleprompter, a statement prepared by somebody against whom she had a bitter and long-standing grudge. He considered the possibility that she might be clinically depressed.