Lev Grossman citations

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

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