The man was obviously a soldier, but Quentin had never really thought about what that meant. He was a professional killer, efficient and businesslike… - Lev Grossman

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

Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there’s more to life than dreaming. He was going to live in the real world from now on, and he was going to learn to appreciate its rough, mundane solidity.

This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.