Lev Grossman Quotes

Some tiny sane part of him knew he was out of control, but that wasn’t the part of him that had its hands on the wheel.

It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either.

They were crossing so many lines it was hard to figure out where they were anymore.

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.

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.

New York’s magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious.

Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic," Fogg said expansively. "It doesn't really make sense. It's a little too perfect, don't you think? If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don't change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.
"Little children don't know that. Magical thinking: that's what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

Everybody has their own idiopathic reaction to their childhood home.

The problem with growing up," Quentin said, "is that once you're grown up, people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.

He's so happy," Eliot said dryly. "It's like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.

Even Quentin knew that using magic to alter one’s physical appearance never ended well. In the world of magical theory it was a dead spot: something about the inextricable, recursive connection between your face and who you were—your soul, for lack of a better word—made it hellishly difficult and fatally unpredictable.

This was real, human sex, and it was so much better just because they weren’t animals—because they were civilized and prudish and self-conscious humans who transformed into sweaty, lustful, naked beasts, not through magic but because that’s who on some level they really were all along.

Quentin’s conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater.

He had no interest in TV anymore—it looked like an electronic puppet show to him, an artificial version of an imitation world that meant nothing to him anyway.

Age," Quentin heard him mutter. "It's wasted on the young. Just like youth.