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.”

Source: The Magicians

“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!”

Source: The Magician King

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

Source: The Magician King

“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.”

Source: The Magicians

“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?”

Source: The Magicians

“She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else”

Source: The Magicians

Lev Grossman Quotes about the world

“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.”

Source: The Magician's Land

“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.”

Source: The Magician King

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

Source: The Magicians

“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.”

Source: The Magician's Land

Lev Grossman

“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.”

“Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out.”

Source: The Magicians

Lev Grossman Quotes about life

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

Source: The Magician's Land

“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.”

Source: The Magicians

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

Source: The Magicians

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

Source: The Magicians

“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.”

Source: The Magicians

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

Source: The Magicians

Lev Grossman Quotes

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

Source: The Magicians

“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.”

Source: The Magician's Land

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

Source: The Magician King

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

Source: The Magicians

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

Source: The Magician King

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

Source: The Magicians

“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.”

Source: The Magician King

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

Source: The Magician King

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

Source: The Magicians

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

Source: The Magician's Land

“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.”

The Magician King

“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.”

Source: The Magician King

“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.”

Source: The Magicians

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

Source: The Magicians

“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?”

Source: The Magician King

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

Source: The Magicians

“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.”

Source: The Magicians

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

Source: The Magicians

“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.”

Source: The Magicians

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

Source: The Magicians

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

Source: The Magician King

“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.”

Source: The Magicians

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

Source: The Magicians

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

Source: The Magicians

“quieter and more intense”

Source: The Magician's Land