Lev Grossman Quotes

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

But now that the ripened fruit of all that preparation was right in front of him he suddenly lost any desire for it. 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. He had it all the time. It was one of the few things he could depend on.

…it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.

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.

But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn’t happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn’t think what else to do.

Who would’ve thought doing nothing all the time would turn out to be so damn tiring?

Sometimes I think you have an overly vivid imagination, Hollis. With some things it’s just not worth thinking about them too carefully before they happen. They almost never turn out to be as horrible as you think they will.

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.

I was just getting comfortable," she said. "Gimme another sec."
"You can have all the sex you want.

“A Man, a Plan, a Bacchanal: Anomie,” said Peters, grandly.

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.

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.

You know what women are like? They’re like those long, skinny blocks you get in Tetris, the ones made out of four blocks straight in a row. First when you need them you can’t get any, then when you don’t need them anymore they’re fucking everywhere and you don’t know what to do with them.