Lev Grossman Quotes

Venice was the only city he’d ever seen that looked the same in real life as it did in pictures. It was consoling that something in this world met expectations.

If there's a bright side to the galaxy," Peter said, more or less aimlessly, "we're on the planet that's farthest from it.

It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended. How was that fair? Fuck it, it was stupid. Theories about life were always bullshit.

“Maybe Fillory doesn’t need a god right now. I think this age might just be a godless one.”
A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn’t seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time—the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They’d have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves. There would still be magic and wonders and all the rest of it, but they would figure out what to do with them with nobody looking over their shoulders, no divine parent-figure meddling with them and helping or not according to his or her divine mood.

Welcome to Facelessbook: an antisocial network.

Age," Quentin heard him mutter. "It's wasted on the young. Just like youth.

How's it going?"
"Pretty well," Quentin said. "I'm not dead.

Quinton didn’t know exactly how to put everything that was ridiculous about that idea in a single sentence.

When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won’t live in a wasteland. I’d rather die in paradise.

It was too terrible to think about, so she dealt with it by not thinking about it.

Janet stopped at the very end of the pier and looked around, hands on hips. Everything looked normal. Not a lot of apocalypse going on here. But then swamps already looked like the end of the world anyway. Maximum entropy, land and water commingled chaotically. There wasn’t much further downhill they could go.

Religion had never been a subject that interested Julia. She considered herself too smart to believe in things she had no evidence for, and that behaved in ways that violated every principle she’d ever observed or heard plausibly spoken about. And she considered herself too tough-minded to believe in things just because they made her feel better. Magic was one thing. With magic you were at least looking at reproducible results. But religion? That was about faith. Uneducated guesses made by weak minds.

It was strange to be naked in front of Pouncy after all the time they’d spent together clothed. 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.

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

It was always easier to screw up somebody else’s spell than it was to cast one yourself. That was one of the many small unfairnesses of magic.