Lev Grossman Quotes & Sayings

I think every fantasy reader secretly believes they know how magic works. — Lev Grossman

As soon as he seized happiness it dispersed and reappeared somewhere else. Like Fillory, like everything good, it never lasted. What a terrible thing to know. — Lev Grossman

The thick plottens. — Lev Grossman

She knew she was obsessed, but it was turning out that she was the kind of person who needed to be obsessed with something, and she could have done a lot worse. — Lev Grossman

And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored. — Lev Grossman

It was funny how just when you thought you knew yourself through and through, you stumbled on a new kind of strength, a fresh reserve of power inside you that you never knew you had, and all at once you found yourself burning a little brighter and hotter than you ever had before. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

Afterward she took the tree aside and conferred with it privately. — Lev Grossman

Plum guessed it stood to reason that out of all these billions of books at least one of them had to be dragon porn. — Lev Grossman

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! — Lev Grossman

Eliot had no idea where he was going, but he'd read enough to know that a state of relative ignorance wasn't necessarily a handicap on a quest. It was something your dauntless questing knight accepted and embraced. You lit out into the wilderness at random, and if your state of mind, or maybe it was your soul, was correct, then adventure would find you through the natural course of events. It was like free association - there were no wrong answers. It worked as long as you weren't trying too hard. — Lev Grossman

Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred. — Lev Grossman

I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life. — Lev Grossman

When he saw Julia, he searched himself for the old love he used to feel for her. It wasn't gone, but it was a dull, distant ache, still there but healed over
just the shrapnel they couldn't remove. — Lev Grossman

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism. — Lev Grossman

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change. — Lev Grossman

Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it'll only turn you into a monster. — Lev Grossman

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

The higher you get the more you realize how much bigger than you everything — Lev Grossman

Plover's words were like dried flowers, stiff and crumbling, crushed flat between pages, when we'd had the living, blooming blossoms all around — Lev Grossman

Its composure thoroughly disrupted, the little treelet, the picture of arboreal distress, let its branches droop a little, and its green birch leaves fluttered anxiously. — Lev Grossman

The flaming ruins of a five-alarm sunset smoldered in the window behind her, which was currently pointing west. "It — Lev Grossman

Now he knew his way around a ward-and-shield or two. He could chuck a magic missile with the best of them. He was a damn one-man magic-missile crisis. — Lev Grossman

You're saying the gods don't have free will."
"The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals. — Lev Grossman

And Quentin had never known how the Maze was redrawn over the summer, but apparently every year in June the groundskeeper goaded the topiary animals into such a feeding frenzy that they fell upon and devoured each other in a kind of ghastly slow-motion vegetarian holocaust. — Lev Grossman

A key part of successfully being Julia, it seemed, was not giving a shit if you looked weird. — Lev Grossman

This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself — Lev Grossman

She had never expected anything special to just happen to her. Her plan for life was to get out there and make special things happen, which was a much more sensible plan from a probability point of view. — Lev Grossman

I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. ' — Lev Grossman

This is a feeling that you had, Quentin, she said. Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many people ever experience. That's where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was. — Lev Grossman

Whether or not he was in it, whether or not he could see or touch it, he'd thought there would always be a FIllory out there somewhere. He loved knowing it was there. It anchored his sense of happiness, the way a distant stockpile of gold might underwrite the value of a paper bill. — Lev Grossman

The real world is horrible. — Lev Grossman

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 — Lev Grossman

Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex. — Lev Grossman

No one gets punished for anything. We do whatever we want, and that's all we do, and nobody stops us, and nobody cares. — Lev Grossman

What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good. — Lev Grossman

A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can't be how the universe works."

"In the Order we call it 'inverse profundity.' We've observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets. — Lev Grossman

The beginning, the laying down of the fundamentals, was always the worst part, which he supposed was why so few people did it. — Lev Grossman

Reading the Fillory books you would think that all one has to do is behave honorably and bravely and all will be well. What a lesson to teach young children. What a way to prepare them for the rest of their lives. — Lev Grossman

You love and you hate and you grieve and you don't even feel it. — Lev Grossman

Her white fox fur was coarse and smooth at the same time, and she made little yipping snarls every time he pushed himself deeper inside her. He never wanted to stop. — Lev Grossman

The hero pays the price. — Lev Grossman

You don't want to move toward some utopian literary situation where everybody's free of all conventions. That's ridiculous! Conventions are what you need. You have nothing to break down if you don't have conventions. — Lev Grossman

A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors. — Lev Grossman

Nothing made you look like more of a dick than standing there trying to find the end of your scabbard with the tip of your sword. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master. — Lev Grossman

I read obsessively when I'm writing. I think there are two kinds of fiction writers, those who read incessantly while they write and those who can't read at all, lest their individual voices get overwhelmed, or tainted somehow. I'm the first kind. To use a painfully precious metaphor, I need fixed stars to navigate by, otherwise I get lost in the blankness of the page. — Lev Grossman

Loosening his tie with one hand, Quentin stepped out into the cold clear winter air and flew. — Lev Grossman

The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The — Lev Grossman

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did.
All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale. — Lev Grossman

Who hadn't at some point in his life wanted to climb to the top of a sailing ship in full flight? — Lev Grossman

The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn't love? — Lev Grossman

Living in a castle is objectively romantic. — Lev Grossman

Use magic in anger, and you will harm yourself much more quickly than you will harm your adversary. — Lev Grossman

For a long time Eliot had had the theory that in Janet's mind everybody was as judgmental of her as she was of them, and if that was true then the world must be a pretty scary place for her. — Lev Grossman

What is the point of magic if we can't fix real problems? — Lev Grossman

Up through around twenty-five he'd never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand. — Lev Grossman

What have people ever done for me? People don't want my help. People called me a faggot and threw me in a Dumpster at recess when I was in fifth grade because my pants were pressed." "Well, — Lev Grossman

When it comes to true humility in the face of history, nothing beats complete silence. — Lev Grossman

The Order seemed to adhere to the principle of suckers walk, players ride. — Lev Grossman

Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian. — Lev Grossman

Everything people forget about ends up there one day, they said. Toys, tables, whole houses. And people end up there too. They get forgotten as well. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might like to go into book publishing. — Lev Grossman

And I need this. That's all I can tell you. — Lev Grossman

The problem was that Julia was smart, and Julia was interested in the truth. She didn't like inconsistencies, and she didn't let go until they were resolved, ever. — Lev Grossman

He imagined another life for himself as one of these silent scholars, buried in his research like a guinea pig in its wood shavings, nibbling away steadily after some arcane piece of knowledge in the hope of making an addition, however imperceptible, to the collective pile. — Lev Grossman

Until sunlight came bleeding up over the horizon, like more acid blood oozing out of his sick ruptured heart, which felt - not that anybody cared - like a rotten drum of biohazardous waste at the very bottom of a landfill, leaching poison into the groundwater, enough poison to kill an entire suburb full of innocent and unsuspecting children. — Lev Grossman

He only had time to feel all the tenderness he had ever felt for her surge up in one infinitely concentrated instant - and to be surprised that it was all still there, moist and intact beneath the unsightly scorched layer of his anger... — Lev Grossman

The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general. — Lev Grossman

And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her parents asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to. — Lev Grossman

It seems to me that the novel as a medium has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. By which I mean: there are a lot of novels published, but the vast majority of them don't represent major contributions to the medium. — Lev Grossman

She swore she could prove it mathematically, but the calculations required were so involved that they would have required a computer the size of the universe, running for a length of time that would have taken them past the projected heat-death of the universe, to work them out. It was pretty much the definition of moot. — Lev Grossman

And on and on, and it all sounded completely, horribly plausible. Any one of a thousand options promised - basically guaranteed - a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out? Why was he still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him? The professors Quentin talked to about it didn't seem concerned at all. They didn't get what the problem was. What should he do? Why, anything he wanted to! — Lev Grossman

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

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

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. — Lev Grossman

But I'm sorry, where did you think you were, motherfucker? Connecticut? You're in a magic safe house in Bed-Stuy, borough of Brooklyn. There was a considerable Venn diagram overlap between people who lived in Bed-Stuy and people who had motherfucking guns. Fool. — Lev Grossman

Nothing a recovering addict likes more than a tale of how bad it had been in the old days, and how low a fellow addict had sunk. Let the one-downsmanship begin. — Lev Grossman

You cannot study magic. You cannot learn it. You must ingest it. Digest it. You must merge with it. And it with you. — Lev Grossman

I don't know if I've ever derived such an immediate sense of calm and well-being from any book as I did from 'Right Ho, Jeeves.' It was like I was Pac-Man and the book was a power-up. — Lev Grossman

That got some appreciative laughter, though he wasn't joking, and the bird didn't laugh. It didn't answer him either. Quentin couldn't read its face; like all birds, it had only one expression. — Lev Grossman

It didn't feel like an exalted business - there was nothing grand about it. It hadn't felt noble and righteous, it felt rough and ugly and bloody and cruel. It was what was necessary, that was all. — Lev Grossman

But you know how there's a certain kind of person - and it's different for everyone - but suddenly when you see them your eye just snags on them, you get caught and you can't look away, and you're ten times more awake than you were a moment ago, and it's like you're a harp string and somebody just plucked you? — Lev Grossman

Emily Greenstreet was one of these girls that nobody ever notices, who are only friends with other girls nobody notices. Nobody likes or dislikes them. They have weak chins, or chicken-pox scars, or their glasses are too big. I know I'm being mean. But you know, they're just sort of at the edge of everything. — Lev Grossman

I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book. - William Shakespeare, The Tempest — Lev Grossman

That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn't be unread. — Lev Grossman

I think she was from Connecticut, but not fancy Connecticut, with the money and the Kennedy cousins and the Lyme disease. I think she was from New Haven, or Bridgeport. — Lev Grossman

quieter and more intense — Lev Grossman

He knew for a fact that one of the girls had managed to take over the plenary session of the national model UN and push through a motion sanctioning the use of nuclear weapons to protect an endangered species of sea turtle. This while representing Lesotho. — Lev Grossman

Of course I'm not sure," he said. "That's why you go. To find out if it's enough. You just have to be sure you want to find out. — Lev Grossman

The effect was of somebody reluctantly reading a prepared statement off a teleprompter, a statement prepared by somebody against whom she had a bitter and long-standing grudge. He considered the possibility that she might be clinically depressed. — Lev Grossman

Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do. — Lev Grossman

I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those. — Lev Grossman

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 because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. — Lev Grossman

That's it?" "That's it. And then you jump in. It's all just tradition. I mean, — Lev Grossman

That's what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child's game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn't matter. Death didn't respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it. — Lev Grossman

Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first. — Lev Grossman

sometimes God wants your son. sometimes He'll settle for a ram. PouncySilverkitten: — Lev Grossman