Quotes About Reality

Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering.

There's no getting away from yourself. Not even in Fillory.

Your magician self, that loopy doppelgänger, was always with you, tugging at your sleeve, whispering silently that your real life was a fake life, a crude and undignified and inauthentic charade that nobody was really buying anyway.

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don't change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.

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

He'd spent too long being disappointed by the world—he'd spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn't the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was. He wasn't going to be suckered in just like that. It was like finding a clue that somebody you'd buried and mourned wasn't really dead after all.

But it wasn't going to kill him. It wasn't sexy, but it was real, and that was what mattered now. No more fantasies—that was life after Fillory.

Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it'll only turn you into a monster. Better to stay home and do card tricks in your bedroom instead.

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?

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.

Maybe it's that the world is an imperfect place, but if you spend all your time looking for something better you'll only end up somewhere even worse.

Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it. Maybe it was all a game, that got crumpled up and thrown away at the end, but while you were here it was real.

Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman

Kids are not physical creatures, and they're not stupid. They know all about violence and power and raw emotions. What's really scary is when adults pretend that such things don't exist." (Grossman's review of The Hunger Games in "Time" magazine, Sept. 7, 2009)

Turns out you can cast some truly amazing shit in your dreams. But after you wake up it all seems kind of pointless, and nobody really wants to hear about it.

Truth is a substance soluble in lichen vodka.

Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't.

You deal with it, and you get on with your life. "Little children don't know that. Magical thinking: that's what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

Magic, Quentin discovered, wasn't romantic at all. It was grim and repetitive and deceptive. And he worked his ass off and became very good at it.

He didn't know if he could explain it to a non-magician. Everything would simply be what it was and nothing else. All there would be was what you could see. What you felt and thought, all the longing and desire in your heart and mind, would count for nothing. With magic you could make those feelings real. They could change the world. Without it they would be stuck inside you forever, figments of your own imagination.

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

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

epiphenomenon. "But