Lev Grossman Quotes

We each of us on our own found ways to get on without Fillory. The real world was not as fantastical and brightly colored as Fillory, but it was very distracting nonetheless, and if it didn’t contain any pegasi or giants it was absolutely teaming with girls who seemed almost as magical and dangerous. Fillory was sweet, but this world was very savory. It was easy to let Fillory go when every football match and scholarship examination and furtive kiss told you to stop fighting, forget it, let it be, leave it behind.

She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else.

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

Sure, but real life's not actually like that," Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. "You don't just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You're not going to be a character in a story, there's nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn't work like that.

But of course You can get so much done when everyone thinks You’re dead. No interruptions. No one prays to a dead God, why would they?

I'm making a serious point."
"Yes, and I am mocking your serious point to show how ludicrous it is.

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.

That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny.

Is that God?" Poppy said.
"That is a god," Penny corrected her. "Though that is really just a term to describe a magician operating on a titanic power scale.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn’t doing it.

He threw his sword away. Screw swords. A magician doesn’t need a sword. A magician doesn’t need anything but what’s inside him.

Up through around twenty-five he’d never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand.

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

Maybe he was lying," Peters said.
"Lie is a blow to the tyranny of fact," Hollis said….
"I think lies are good," he said. "People should lie more. Lies are like these little peepholes into a better 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. His mind was dimly awakening, too late, to other things that were as important, or even more so.