Quotes from Lev Grossman

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 you want to

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full

He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.

The problem with growing up," Quentin said, "is that once you're grown up, people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore." "We

Please don't tell me you're going to go to Fillory so you can get more homework done," Alice said. "Because that would be the saddest thing I've ever heard.

Well, okay, then know this." Janet put her hands on her hips. She had struck an unexpected vein of bitterness in herself, and it was running away with her. "We human beings are unhappy all the time. We hate ourselves and we hate each other and sometimes we wish You or Whoever had never created us or this shit-ass world or any other shit-ass world. Do You realize that? So next time You might think about not doing such a half-assed job.

suit, Quentin knew he wasn't happy. Why not? 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.

What is the point of magic if we can't use it to fix real problems?

never-ending game of tag, where everyone else was it and you could never stop running.

In the Order we call it 'inverse profundity.' We've observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.

I sacrifice a virgin schoolgirl every other fortnight by the light of a gibbous moon, using a silver scalpel forged by Swiss albinos. Who are also virgins.

Now he had answers, but they weren't doing what answers were supposed to do: they weren't making things simpler or easier. They weren't helping.

She'd broken her staff and drowned her book and sworn off magic forever.

Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be. That was always part of the problem, Quentin. I felt like I had to be interested in you all the time. You wanted love so desperately, and I thought it was my job to give it to you. Poor little lost boy! That's not love, that's hell. And I was getting a taste of heaven. I was a blue angel now.

You. Killed. A. Hermit. You. Weird. Sweaty. Bastard!

I hope," she said, "that you don't think you're going to keep me here with bacon." "Not

He only had time to feel all the tenderness he had ever felt for her surge up in one infinitely concentrated instant - and to be surprised that it was all still there, moist and intact beneath the unsightly scorched layer of his anger...

Trees were fucking mental in a fight, it turned out.

His molten anger and grief were cooling into a glossy protective coating, a hard transparent lacquer of uncaring. If he couldn't go back, he would just have to do things differently going forward. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything.

He showed her a wonderful garden, where all the thoughts and feelings that had ever been thought and felt existed in the form of plants, blooming and green as they passed through people's minds and lived in their hearts, and then drying up and turning brown and crisp as they passed out of mind, sometimes to bloom again in another season, sometimes gone forever. It

You wish to be a hero, but you do not know what a hero is. You think a hero is one who wins. But a hero must be prepared to lose,

Quentin could feel the martini doing its wintery work, frosting over his mind, silvering over his frontal lobes, preparing the ground for a proper hard freeze.

Then again they were both here, far out at sea, tempest-tossed, together in a warm berth in the freezing wasteland of the ocean.

Maybe she was crazy, but she wasn't stupid. She'd seen Terminator 2. She wasn't going out like Sarah Connor.