Lev Grossman Quotes

“Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.”

“You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here!”

“Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.”

“The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.”

“Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?”

“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.”

“He wasn't in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren't their fault.”

“If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.”

“In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.”

“There is really no end to life's little humiliations.”

“The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.”

“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.”

“It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.”

“Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.”

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

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

“The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.”

“He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”

“By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.”

“The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.”

“That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.”

“You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.”

“Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.”

“He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.”

“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.”

“Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.”

“You can’t just decide to be happy.”

“No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?”

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

“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.”

“She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.”

“Now he had answers, but they weren't doing what answers were supposed to do: they weren't making things simpler or easier. They weren't helping.”

“Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.”

“Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.”

“The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.”

“We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.”

“we among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would.”

“quieter and more intense”

“Give 'em Hades.”