Lev Grossman Quotes

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.

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.

That’s when they turned to religion.
At this Julia pushed her chair back from the table. She could feel her intellectual gag reflex about to kick in.

Tell me, what's the first thing a hacker does once he breaks into a system?"
"I don't know," Quentin said. "He steals a bunch of credit card numbers and subscribes to a lot of really premium porn sites?"
"He sets up a back door." It was good to know that even having attained enlightenment Penny was still impervious to humor. "So that if he's ever locked out, he can get back in.

I don't think they can change their minds. When you get to that level of power and knowledge and perfection, the question of what you should do next gets increasingly obvious. Everything is very rule-governed. All you can ever do in any given situation is the most gloriously perfect thing, and there's only one of them. Finally there aren't any choices left to make at all."
"You're saying the gods don't have free will."
"The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals.

A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can't be how the universe works."
"In the Order we call it 'inverse profundity.' We've observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.

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.

Anyway, what's wrong with a little unreality?" Quentin said. "Unreality is underrated.

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.

The man was obviously a soldier, but Quentin had never really thought about what that meant. He was a professional killer, efficient and businesslike. He had none of Bingle’s elegance. He was like a baker, except instead of making bread he made corpses, and he wanted to make Quentin into one.

This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself.

She’d gotten good at coaxing. If all else failed she had the power of the bathroom handjob, and she wielded it with an iron fist.

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

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

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