Quotes from Lev Grossman

Are you kidding? That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog.

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.

Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They're bored with their lives, and there's nothing they can do about it. They're eaten alive by longing, and they're dead before they die.

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

He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

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.

You can't just decide to be happy." "No, you can't. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

Drinks were a lot like books, really: it didn't matter where you were, the contents of a vodka tonic were always more or less the same, and you could count on them to take you away to somewhere better or at least make your present arrangements seem more manageable.

He wasn't surprised. 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.

That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn't be unread.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

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.

Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.

His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he'd gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.

Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.

The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

That's what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child's game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn't matter. Death didn't respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.

Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.