Quotes by Lev Grossman

“I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.”

“In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.”

“As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever ...”

“[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else...”

“Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain....”

“A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong ...”

“Well, why would you create something that had the power to hurt You? Or any of Your creatures? Why don't You help us? Do You have any idea how much we hurt? How much we suffer?I know all things, da...”

“I think youre magicians because youre unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that...”

“The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it? ”

“It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though-- and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger-- he was angry only because his position was so weak.”

“Thats what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a childs game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didnt...”

“Like wine, Provenal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, win...”

“I guess were supposed to have faith.I never really took you for the faith-having kind, Quentin said.I didnt either. But its worked out so far. Weve got five of the seven keys. You cant argue with r...”

“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.”

“We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.”

“You didnt get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.”

“Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing ones cues.”

“He was in the right place. He was living his best life. How many other people in the multiverse could say that?”

“Becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life.”

“Language and reality are kept strictly apartreality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesnt care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldnt.”