Lev Grossman Quotes

Specifically she was into dragons.
Quentin suppose it was an extension of the general Australian preoccupation with fatally dangerous animals. Start with saltwater crocodiles and box jellyfish and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump up the food chain before you got to dragons.

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.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

“I started hanging out with this one girl, big-time warrior for one of the cities. She was very into the magic thing. And also I guess their menfolk weren’t especially well-endowed in the hardware aisle, if you take my meaning.”
“I believe I grasp the essence of it, yes,” Quentin said.

He couldn’t ignore how conspicuously beautiful Venice was. People had been living here for what, a thousand years? More? God only knew whose crazy idea it was to build a city in the middle of a lagoon, but you couldn’t argue with the results.

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.

He had gotten it so easy, and she had it so hard, and why? There was no good reason. He passed a test, and she failed it. That was a judgment on the test, not on her, but now her life was a waking nightmare, and he had everything he ever wanted. He was living a fantasy. Her fantasy. She wanted it back.

The sun set. The car smelled of its owner’s cigarette smoke. Everything was toxic and chemical and unnatural: the plastic walnut trim, the electric lights, the burning gasoline that was shoving them forward. This whole world was a processed petroleum product.

He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.

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

That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect.

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.

Could the man really not have explained? Did his daughter really not understand what had happened? It didn’t add up. If they’d talked about it and figured things out it could have been a happy ending. People in fairy tales never just figured things out.

If this was madness it was an entirely new kind of madness, as yet undocumented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She had nerdophrenia. She was dorkotic.

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.