Quotes from Lev Grossman

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one's cues.

Sometimes you just have to do things, Quentin," Julia said, as he climbed on board after her. "You spend too much of your time waiting.

Give a nerd enough time and a door he can close and he can figure out pretty much anything.

Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer.

What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn't an adventure?

Funny how life had its little ways of surprising you. Little quirks of fate.

Julia would do anything to make the time pass. She killed time, murdered it, massacred it and hid the bodies. She threw her days in bunches onto the bonfire with both hands and watched them go up in fragrant smoke. It wasn't easy. Sometimes it felt like the hours had ground to a halt. They fought her as they passed, one after the other, like stubborn stools.

We have lived too long. The great days are past.

Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there's more to life than dreaming.

You're saying the gods don't have free will." "The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals.

She had never expected anything special to just happen to her. Her plan for life was to get out there and make special things happen, which was a much more sensible plan from a probability point of view.

The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything.

Never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink," he said. "Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn't drink.

All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn't be it. It had been diverted elsewhere, to somebody else, and he'd been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead

but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.

The librarian thought the problem was just that the right books weren't breeding with each other and proposed a forced mating program. The library committee had an epic secret meeting about the ethics of literary eugenics which ended in a furious deadlock.

Sometimes he looked at her and thought, Gosh, I wonder what's underneath all that anger, all that hard glossy armor? Maybe there's just an innocent, wounded little girl in there who wants to come out and play and be loved and get happy. But now he wondered if maybe that little girl was long gone, or if she'd ever been there at all. What was under all that armor, all that anger? More anger, and more armor. Anger and armor, all the way down.

A key part of successfully being Julia, it seemed, was not giving a shit if you looked weird.

She was a person with her own hopes and feelings and history and nightmares. In her own way she was as lost as he was.

This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.

She knew she was obsessed, but it was turning out that she was the kind of person who needed to be obsessed with something, and she could have done a lot worse.

You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.

Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?" "Oh, absolutely," Quentin said. "Maybe even more.

It's true," Eliot said. "Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don't spoil it.