Lev Grossman Quotes

There was more to life than being fat and safe and warm in a clockwork luxury resort. Or maybe there wasn't more, but he was going to find out. And how did you find out? You had an adventure. That's how. You picked up a golden key.

His bedroom was the gilded, diamond-studded, pearl-encrusted rococo lair of a god-king.

She didn't mind if she died trying. Suicide was in everything she did now, and everything she thought. Suicide was her home: if she could find nothing else, then suicide would always have her.

Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.

Look, who's the talking bear here?" Quentin snapped. "Is it you? Are you the talking fucking bear? All right. So shut the fuck up.

In one huge leather-gloved fist Jollyby held up a large, madly kicking hare by its ears.
'Son of a bitch,' Dauntless said. 'He caught it.'
Dauntless was a talking horse. She just didn't talk much.

The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.

The Order seemed to adhere to the principle of suckers walk, players ride.

And on and on, and it all sounded completely, horribly plausible. Any one of a thousand options promised - basically guaranteed - a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out? Why was he still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him? The professors Quentin talked to about it didn't seem concerned at all. They didn't get what the problem was. What should he do? Why, anything he wanted to!

He hit terminal velocity and kept accelerating,

When it comes to true humility in the face of history, nothing beats complete silence.

There is really no end to life's little humiliations.

Facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future.

The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn't love?

He was going to be a motherfucking Magician.

Tomorrow I'll take you out to see the gold beetles. They're amazing: they eat dirt and poop out gold ore.

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

Plus, magic just doesn't feel like a tool. Can you imagine how boring it would be if casting a spell were like turning on an electric drill? But it's not. It's irregular and beautiful. It's not an artifact, it's something else, something organic. It feels like a grown thing, not a made thing.

You didn't get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

5 1/2 centuries after its 1.0 release, the book is a surprisingly robust piece of information technology. Sure, its memory is relatively tiny
one novel adds up to less than a megabyte. But it doesn't need charging, and it never crashes. Its interface is rapidly and intuitively navigable. The scroll never stood a chance.

quieter and more intense

But not even the end of the world was going to stop Janet from being a bitch. It was the principle of the thing.

I think you're magicians because you're unhappy. 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. "Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But

I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.

If being a hero is a matter of knowing your cues, like the fairy tale said, he'd missed his.

We among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would.

Magic doesn't come from talent, it comes from pain.

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.

Maybe there's a sense that technology isn't necessarily the answer to a lot of our problems. Fantasy offers readers a less radically alienated world - a world where desires and feelings that normally are trapped inside your mind are made real in the form of magic.

I think for a long time, I was paralyzed by some of my hopes and ideals for what my life was going to be like. I had this perfect vision of how my life should go, but it seemed - it was - impossible to realize, so I sat around for a long, long time doing almost nothing at all.

Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex.

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

sometimes God wants your son. sometimes He'll settle for a ram. PouncySilverkitten:

I've read plenty of J.G. Ballard, but I'm not really a Ballardian. I've met Ballardians, and I know when I can't compete. I like Ballard in his relatively unchallenging apocalyptic mode: 'Vermilion Sands,' 'The Drowned World,' 'The Burning World,' 'The Crystal World.'

He had reached the outer limits of what Fun, capital F, could do for him. The cost was way too high, the returns pitifully inadequate.

Supposedly the Thames dragon wrote most of Pink Floyd's stuff. At least after Syd Barrett left. But there's no way to prove it.

By the standards of magical society they'd fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn't had the basic good sense to keep their shit to themselves.

Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.

No one gets punished for anything. We do whatever we want, and that's all we do, and nobody stops us, and nobody cares.

I don't know how to phrase this exactly but what the fuck?

I feel that's one of the central questions of fantasy. What did we lose when we entered the 20th and 21st century, and how can we mourn what we lost, and what can we replace it with? We're still asking those questions in an urgent way.

In case of Ragnarok break glass and play an E flat. Where's

When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might like to go into book publishing.

The situation wasn't ideal. But it was what she had to work with, so she would work with it. She was a tough one,

But where was he going to go, exactly? It was not considered the thing to look panicked or even especially concerned about graduation, but everything about the world after Brakebills felt dangerously vague and under-thought to Quentin. What was he going to do? What exactly? Every ambition he'd ever had in his life had been realized the day he was admitted to Brakebills, and he was struggling to formulate a new one with any kind of practical specificity. This wasn't Fillory, where there was some magical war to be fought. There was no Watcherwoman to be rooted out, no great evil to be vanquished, and without that everything else seemed so mundane and penny-ante. No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters.

Escapism has value, even if I don't know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it's just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.

The silver years of the Chatwins are long ago now, and the years since have been forged from baser metals. You

There must still be some last invisible unbroken strand connecting them, something deeper than mourning. The wound had healed but the scar wouldn't fade, not quite.

I was perfectly happy where I was, deliquescing, atom by atom, amid a riot of luxury.

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.

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

...being around him wasn't good for Quentin. He could feel himself regressing in the direction of an adolescent tantrum - it was like trying to talk to his parents. He lost all perspective on who he was and how far he'd come.

Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it'll only turn you into a monster.

He was in the right place. He was living his best life. How many other people in the multiverse could say that?

The whole scene had a dreamlike quality, like a Chagall painting come to life.

You might jump in at this point and say: Hey. Guy. (It's Mark.) Okay, Mark. If the same day is repeating over and over again, if every morning it just goes back to the beginning automatically, with everything exactly the way it was, then you could basically do whatever you want, am I right? I mean, sure, you could go to the library, but you could go to the library naked and it wouldn't even matter, because it would all be erased the next day like a shaken Etch A Sketch. You could, I don't know, rob a bank or hop a freight train or tell everybody what you really think of them. You could do anything you wanted.
Which was, yes, theoretically true. But honestly, in this heat, who has the energy? What I wanted was to sit on my ass somewhere air-conditioned and read books.

He wasn't in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; 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.

Most of the students, and probably the faculty, were ambivalent about the whole idea of Disciplines. They were socially divisive, the theory behind them was weak, and everybody ended up studying pretty much the same curriculum anyway, so what was the point? But it was traditional for every student to have one, so a Discipline every student would have. Alice called it her magic bat mitzvah.

You need to do more than memorize, Quentin. You must learn the principles of magic with more than your head. You must learn them with your bones, with your blood, your liver, your heart, your deek. He grabbed his crotch through his dressing gown and gave it a shake.

You think Candy Land is real?" Josh said. "'Cause I would ditch Fillory in a red-hot minute for that shit. Chocolate Swamp and all. And have you seen Princess Frostine?" "Maybe

They were joined by Julia, who kept her sunglasses on and ate only marmite, straight from the jar, which if anything seemed like further proof of her declining humanity.

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

Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn't get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do. That was the hard part, accepting that you didn't get to choose which way you went.

Humbledrum farted mournfully, three distinct notes.

One thing had always confused Quentin about the magic he read about in books: it never seemed especially hard to do. There were lots of furrowed brows and thick books and long white beards and whatnot, but when it came right down to it, you memorized the incantation - or you just read it off the page, if that was too much trouble - you collected the herbs, waved the wand, rubbed the lamp, mixed the potion, said the words - and just like that the forces of the beyond did your bidding. It was like making salad dressing or driving stick or assembling Ikea furniture - just another skill you could learn. It took some time and effort, but compared to doing calculus, say, or playing the oboe - well, there really was no comparison. Any idiot could do magic.

They were where he went when he couldn't deal with the real world, which was a lot.

You love and you hate and you grieve and you don't even feel it.

It was the strangest thing, but he was looking forward to everything so much, he could hardly stand it. He never would have believed it. He never thought he would.
"You know what?" He took Alice's hand. "Let's fly.

I recognize that on paper, you can't really tell that I'm a fan or a nerd.

Eliot had no idea where he was going, but he'd read enough to know that a state of relative ignorance wasn't necessarily a handicap on a quest. It was something your dauntless questing knight accepted and embraced. You lit out into the wilderness at random, and if your state of mind, or maybe it was your soul, was correct, then adventure would find you through the natural course of events. It was like free association - there were no wrong answers. It worked as long as you weren't trying too hard.

To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own pwer in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was sadi to have been quite dramatic. A painteding the scned survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormaous atlases soaring around the place like condors.
But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear o the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly dposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300-1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub - sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribably papery susurrus.

There are any number of reasons to want novels to survive. The way [Jonathan] Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can't. He cites -- as one does -- the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions. With the help of cell phones, e-mail and handheld games, it's easier to stay busy, in the Kierkegaardian sense, than it's ever been.

Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. "We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful," Franzen says. "The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.

Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since
well, since the early 18th century. The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It's about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

The smell of life." "The smell of farts.

We found some of them. It was always either a fight

It didn't feel like an exalted business - there was nothing grand about it. It hadn't felt noble and righteous, it felt rough and ugly and bloody and cruel. It was what was necessary, that was all.

Credulity that was being tested. A fat man with red

With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.

I just completed a long car trip on a Sunday in August with two small children, which believe me is enough to convince you that Samuel Beckett was right about everything.

He felt like he was coming back to life too. Not that he'd been dead, just ... not quite alive. Something else.

When he watched TV, all he saw was an image of his own face, with a mysterious empty city in the background.

He imagined another life for himself as one of these silent scholars, buried in his research like a guinea pig in its wood shavings, nibbling away steadily after some arcane piece of knowledge in the hope of making an addition, however imperceptible, to the collective pile.

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

They had a choice to make: go on, or go home.

An elephant fell off a cliff, a copper cliff, which practically broke my heart. Elephants and gravity, not a great mix. But you know what? The other elephants immediately stopped and went down and found what was left of it and stood around it in a ring. I couldn't see what they did, but when they were done - it took a day - the one that fell was all back together and up and running again. They resurrected him, I've never seen anything like it. Elephants, they know some shit. I don't know why we rule them, they should rule us.

A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors.

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

As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules. These Exceptions were indicated by rows of asterisks and daggers and other more obscure typographical fauna which invited the reader to peruse the many footnotes that cluttered up the margins of magical reference books like Talmudic commentary.

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 it in perspective.

If you're too good too much of the time, people start to forget about you. You're not a problem, so people can strike you off their list of things to worry about.

He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world-he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly,humiliatingly, just to get one sip of air.

He had an air of magnificent melancholy sophistication, as if his proper place were elsewhere, somewhere infinitely more compelling even than Brakebills, and he'd been confined to his present setting by a grotesque divine oversight, which he tolerated with as much good humor as could be expected.

I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.

Living in a castle is objectively romantic.

Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.

Labyrinths were old sorcery, and subtle: good for recharging one's magical resources when they were running low.

Everything people forget about ends up there one day, they said. Toys, tables, whole houses. And people end up there too. They get forgotten as well.

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

About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell ... I defy anybody to read the first page and not keep going to the last.

Everyone was pretending to be bored to tears, or maybe they actually were, but Quentin wasn't. He was unexpectedly happy, though he instinctively kept it a secret. In fact he was so fully of joy and relief he could barely breathe. Like a receding glacier the ordeal of the Beast had left behind a changed world, jumbled and scraped and raw, but the earth was finally putting up new green shoots again.