Lev Grossman Quotes

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 somewhere else, to somebody else, and he’d been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead.

It was fair to call it depression. She felt like shit, all the time. If that was depression, she had it. It must have been contagious. She’d caught it from the world.

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.

She wore a simple flowing white gown. So did everybody else. Gummidgy also wore a crown of mistletoe.
So your basic Golden Bough deal, Julia thought. Fucking mistletoe. She never saw what all the fuss was about. Sure, it’s pretty enough, but at the end of the day it’s still a botanical parasite that strangles its host.

Wishes are for children," Jane Chatwin said. "I grew up.

I just thought of this—it’s the American university system. This is my new theory: the New Feudalism. You go to college and you get used to living like some kind of medieval overlord, with people waiting on you and everything, and it warps your mind. It happens to everybody. By the time you graduate you have all the personal habits of an aristocrat, and none of the money. No wonder you’re dysfunctional—you’re a twentieth-century office temp who’s channeling a nobleman in the British Raj.

It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either.

Any idea where we're going?"
"We discussed this. That's not how quests work. We're not going to think about it, we're just going to journey."
"I can't not think about it."
"Well, don't overthink it."
"I can't help it!" Janet said. "Whatever, you can do the not-thinking for both of us.

New York’s magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious.

When he graduated he’d thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero’s journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn’t how it worked.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

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.

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.

Well," she announced cheerfully, "he's dead!

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.