Quotes from Lev Grossman

And had Eliot really been awake for the whole thing? His brain dealt out a sloppy fan of mental Polaroids, out of sequence: an image of Janet kissing Eliot, of her hand working diligently between Eliot's legs. Had she really been weeping? Had he kissed Eliot? A vivid sense memory of somebody else's stubble, surprisingly scratchy, chafing his cheek and upper lip.

I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit," Eliot said. "Though that would explain a lot." It

Their little dance was like the endgame of a disastrously bloody chess match, just a queen chasing a beleaguered king around an empty board, sadistically refusing to checkmate.

Emily Greenstreet was one of these girls that nobody ever notices, who are only friends with other girls nobody notices. Nobody likes or dislikes them. They have weak chins, or chicken-pox scars, or their glasses are too big. I know I'm being mean. But you know, they're just sort of at the edge of everything.

She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please, just be somewhere else and somebody else.

Buddha going down with the ship, while the bed gradually swamped, and the cold seawater lapped up over his knees.

Every morning when he woke up it seemed impossible that he could ever consume another drop of alcohol, but that conviction had always evaporated by five o'clock in the afternoon.

The air was quiet and still. It felt weird to be standing on solid ground again. "Worst away team ever," Josh said, wading up onto land. "Not a single redshirt.

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

When he was younger it seemed like the only time he wasn't afraid was when he was angry.

If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine

Quentin," she said hoarsely. "You changed your hair.

thereby forfeiting the juicy solo in Peter and the Wolf (the duck's theme) to the demonstrably inferior Evelyn Oh, whose rendition of it did, appropriately enough, sound like a quacking fucking duck, as did everything that came out of Evelyn Oh's quacking fucking Oh-boe.

Hey—Penny, is it?" Plum said. "That ought to pay for Quentin's library fines, don't you think? Or Alice could just punch you again, it's all good." But

Your mother bled when I-" "Shh!"[..] "-when I popped her cherry", Janet finished in a whisper. "That doesn't make sense!" John hissed.

She was especially confident when it came to pointing out other people's mistakes. Not that she was a know-it-all—it didn't seem to be an ego thing with her. 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.

He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.

His room was a maelstrom of books and paper and laundry, as usual,

Hate isn't like love, it doesn't end. It goes on forever. You can never get to the bottom of it. And it's so pure, so unconditional!

You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn't, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn't. Put

epiphenomenon. "But

Theories about life were always bullshit.

But I realized I had to become something. I had to take what was done to me and use it to make myself into what I wanted to be. And I wanted this. And when I called Her, the goddess came.

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. It