Lev Grossman Quotes

It was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you.

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.

His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.

“You’re an interesting case,” she said.
There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected.

Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.

A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors.

Once magic was real everything else just seemed so unreal.

His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he’d gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.

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.

Quentin had never met anybody so staggeringly and unapologetically affected.

He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping and uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters. It wasn’t something he had much practice at.

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

He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world—he’d spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was.

The Dean will probably be down to get you in another minute," Eliot said. "Here's my advice. Sit there…and try to look like you belong here. And if you tell him you saw me smoking, I will banish you to the lowest circle of hell. Which I've never been there, but if even half of what I hear is true it's almost as bad as Brooklyn.

Quentin wished she weren’t so attractive. Unpretty women were so much easier to deal with in someways—you didn’t have to face the pain of their probable unattainability.