Lev Grossman Quotes

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

Are you smart?"
There was no non-embarrassing answer to this.
"I guess."
"Don't worry about it, everybody here is. If they even brought you in for the Exam you were the smartest person in your school, teachers included. Everyone here was the cleverest little monkey in his or her particular tree. Except now we're all in one tree together. It can be a shock. Not enough coconuts to go round. You'll be dealing with your equals for the first time in your life, and your betters. You won't like it.

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

But that was the thing about the old days: they were old. This was his life now. He was content, and if not happy then happier than he ever thought he’d be again. He had work to do….The past was what it was, his home was here, and anything else was a fantasy.

Be careful what you learn from me," he said. "What is written with a sword cannot be erased.

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.

Just then, for an instant, the film of reality slipped off the spokes of its projector. Everything went completely askew and then righted itself again as if nothing had happened.

Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.

Hate isn’t like love, it doesn’t end. It goes on forever. You can never get to the bottom of it. And it’s so pure, so unconditional!

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.

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.

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.

I admit that you might possibly not be deluding yourself about that.

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.

What do you call this style?" Quentin asked.
"The mistake people make," Bingle said, "is thinking that there are different styles."
"All right."
"Force, balance, leverage, momentum—these principles never change. They are your style.