Lev Grossman - The Magicians (2009)

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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.

Lev Grossman
It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

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

Lev Grossman
We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.

Lev Grossman
When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt's house and slip through into Fillory...it's like he's opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.

Lev Grossman
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.

Lev Grossman
If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

Lev Grossman
It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though— and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger— he was angry only because his position was so weak.

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

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

Lev Grossman
For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. 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. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.

Lev Grossman
That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

Lev Grossman
It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn't think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.

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

Lev Grossman
Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?

Lev Grossman
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.

Lev Grossman
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.

Lev Grossman
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.

Lev Grossman
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 you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

Lev Grossman