Grossman Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes I think I am fate's sword. She wields me cruelly." Quentin wondered what it was like to be so unselfconsciously melodramatic. Nice, probably. "Right. — Lev Grossman

I don't believe in your "Good". I believe in human kindness. — Vasily Grossman

Would have to find something else, he thought mazily. Something new. Couldn't stay here anymore. Couldn't go back. Only forward. — Lev Grossman

There must still be some last invisible unbroken strand connecting them, something deeper than mourning. The wound had healed but the scar wouldn't fade, not quite. — Lev Grossman

Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist. — Richard Grossman

shake him up. Get him out of his comfort zone so he could stop sneering at everybody else who was out of theirs. Get him thinking about something besides his own neuroses for a change. — 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

It was then that he started his novel The People Immortal, and when I read it later, many of its pages seemed to me very familiar. He found himself as a writer during the war. His pre-war books were nothing more than searching for his theme and language. He was a true internationalist and reproached me frequently for saying "Germans" instead of "Hitler's men" when describing the atrocities of the occupiers.' Ehrenburg was persuaded that it was Grossman's all-embracing world view which made the xenophobic Stalin hate him. — Vasily Grossman

What constitutes the character of a nation is the character of many individual human beings; every national character is in essence, simply human nature. All the worlds nations, therefore, have a great deal in common with one another. The foundation of any national character is human nature. The foundation of national character is simply a particular colouring taken on by human nature, a particular crystallisation of it. — Vasily Grossman

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works. — Lev Grossman

This absolute lack of objectivity might be said to resemble nothing so much as the lack of objectivity these same people had shown during Stalin's life, when they had been so supremely worshipful of his mind and strength of will, of his foresight and genius. Their hysterical worship of Stalin and their total and unconditional rejection of him sprang from the same soil. — Vasily Grossman

The book should betray me, in the sense that it should take me to places I am afraid to go — David Grossman

Depending on how you looked at it, Darren was our Mick Jagger (designated swaggering extrovert) to Simon's Keith Richards (quietly virtuosic, blatantly self-destructive). Or else Darren had been Paul McCartney (chirpily commercial) and Simon had been John Lennon (moody, introspective, possessed of quasi-mystical insights). — Austin Grossman

She breathes as if he had held her hand and helped her jump over the chasm of that scar. — David Grossman

... and the rest of his life lay in front of him like a barren, meaningless postscript. — Lev Grossman

When you can't bear something but it goes on anyway, the person who survives isn't you anymore; you've changed and become someone else, a new person, the one who did bear it after all. — Austin Grossman

I am exclusively occupied with the problem of gravitation and hope with the help of a local mathematician friend [Marcel Grossman] to overcome all the difficulties. One thing is certain, however, that never in life have I been quite so tormented. A great respect for mathematics has been instilled within me, the subtler aspects of which, in my stupidity, I regarded until now as pure luxury. — Albert Einstein

When you're reading my book, you're not in a four dimensional continuum, you're in my continuum, the Grossman continuum. — Richard Grossman

His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling. — Lev Grossman

I have a strong spiritual commitment, and I try to express that in my work. Salvation cannot be worked out in human terms. The point of my writing is to touch upon the systematics of prayer and on how we arrive at a method of achieving spiritual coherence in our lives. — Richard Grossman

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up. — David Grossman

If you throw the pebble in the pond and the rings start circulating that much wider, you've done things and created things for people that they didn't think they'd ever be able to do. That excites me. — Mindy Grossman

he'd learned the secret of a richer, more powerful adult rage. "It isn't how it was! It never will be again! They changed the rules on us, so as far as I'm concerned all bets are off." He cinched his belt tight. "If They apologized, if They showed — Lev Grossman

I would almost plead for a pinprick of salvation, to pierce the burden, the damned skin of words wrapped around me. — David Grossman

Telling secrets to a writer is like embracing a pickpocket. — David Grossman

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home. — Lev Grossman

was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you - he — Lev Grossman

The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for. — Lev Grossman

I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don't need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me. — Lev Grossman

You describe your reality in the highest resolution even when it's a nightmare and in doing so, you live your own life, not a cliche others have formulated for you. — David Grossman

She had not known how to tell him that his loving whispers were always in her ears, like a story she'd been told, the story of a thing she did not deserve. But he understood. He called those thoughts "the baby teeth of a snake," and swore he would rip them out of her, and pledged to prove to her that the opposite was true. And he didn't even have to explain to her what he meant by "the opposite"; she knew it was the opposite of her. — David Grossman

Maybe she was crazy, but she wasn't stupid. She'd seen Terminator 2. She wasn't going out like Sarah Connor. — Lev Grossman

A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying. — 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

They soon lost interest in Sofya. She was just one more prisoner -with no more idea of her destination than anyone else. No one asked her name and patronymic; no one remembered her surname. She realized with surprise that although the process of evolution had taken millions of years, these people had needed only a few days to revert to the state of cattle, dirty and unhappy, captive and nameless. — Vasily Grossman

I'm not one of your knockabout, knuckle-scarred, Internet-controversy-courting book critics. Occasionally I stumble into controversy accidentally, but not because I enjoy it. It's probably just because I'm a weird person. — Lev Grossman

Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English. — Lev Grossman

She started wearing black and listening to the Smiths and reading Camus — Lev Grossman

Perfect worlds do not exist. There are only the funny, strange, weeping, singing, truncated, and imperfect universes created by the gods of paintbrush and musical instruments, the gods who infuse their creations with their own blood, their own soul. When he looks at these worlds, the true Lord of Hosts, the creator of the universe, probably cannot help but smile mockingly — Vasily Grossman

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

The centaurs regarded Quentin with pity nicely tempered by a near-total lack of interest. Also, they seemed to be constantly afraid that he was going to tip over. None — Lev Grossman

A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn't seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time - the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They'd have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves. — Lev Grossman

He showed her a wonderful garden, where all the thoughts and feelings that had ever been thought and felt existed in the form of plants, blooming and green as they passed through people's minds and lived in their hearts, and then drying up and turning brown and crisp as they passed out of mind, sometimes to bloom again in another season, sometimes gone forever. It — Lev Grossman

Man's innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed. Totalitarianism cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perishes. Eternal, ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is the basis of totalitarianism. Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds out hope for our time, hope for the future. — Vasily Grossman

For him, the Holocaust was a laboratory gone mad, accelerating and intensifying human processes a hundredfold ... — David Grossman

The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its own shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience. — Vasily 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

Grigoryevich...Not that he had any real talent himself - but what a lot of deaths of talented people he had witnessed. Young physicists and historians, specialists in ancient languages, philosophers, musicians, young Russian Swifts and Erasmuses - how many of them he had seen put on their "wooden jackets." Prerevolutionary literature had often lamented the fate of serf actors, musicians, and painters. But who was there today to write about the young men and women who had never had the chance to write their books and paint their paintings? The Russian earth is indeed fertile and generous. She gives birth to her own Platos, to her own quick-witted Newtons - but how casually and terribly she devours these children of hers. — Vasily Grossman

He was aware for the first time of how quiet the city had gotten. After dark the streets and canals seemed to empty out. As if Venice felt less of an obligation to pretend to be part of this millennium at night, and had reverted to its medieval self again. — Lev Grossman

The voice came from the other side of the divider, an older man, bald, who wore a leather vest over a dark blue button-down shirt, like a Radio Shack manager who moonlighted as a forest brigand. — Austin Grossman

I never went back to my room. I took the Fung Wah bus from South Station. — Lev Grossman

I've always had a philosophy that position doesn't define power. Impact defines power. What impact are you making on people? What impact are you making on business? — Mindy Grossman

The Deeper Magic always seemed to come up when Ember didn't feel like doing something, or needed to close a plot hole. — 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

I think that life is incredibly violent and that individual people are incredibly violent on one level or another. I don't try to change life to suit my writing; in a certain way I'm a naturalist of the nineteenth century school. — Richard Grossman

I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know - the guy from 'Perfect Strangers.' — Lev Grossman

Sure, but real life's not actually like that," Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. "You don't just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You're not going to be a character in a story, there's nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn't work like that. — Lev Grossman

Shit was getting geological, yo. — Lev Grossman

In real life it was like they were playing some children's game. It was a little kid's idea of a magical object. Though what did you expect from a bunch of talking — Lev Grossman

Lisa had an engineer's way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking. — Austin Grossman

Who wants to make the language of dreams? — Austin Grossman

Something has fallen asleep there, that's all, but it's warm, and it's hers, it's the pain imprinted on her, and his healing powers rise up. It's her with everything she now is. — David Grossman

Maybe he was the anti-Santa, of the South Pole, and he was going to show them where the elves made lumps of coal for Anti-Christmas. — 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

Beer might help with that," Quentin said. He felt punchy. "This could be the next clue. If it's a talking beer, I mean a talking bear, we could, you know, talk to it. — Lev Grossman

You haven't known terror until you've been chased by a man-sized crow. — Austin Grossman

But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn't happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn't think what else to do. — Lev Grossman

The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten. — Lev Grossman

My books are not about different components that fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, it's about creating the space around the components, which is almost as important as the components themselves. And that space changes and blends depending upon what the components are. — Richard Grossman

How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love; and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often. — Lev Grossman

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings. — Lev Grossman

The nationalism of a small nation can, with treacherous ease, become detached from its roots in what is noble and human. It then become pitiful, making the nation appear smaller rather than greater. It is the same with nations as with individuals; while trying to draw attention to the inadequacies of others, people all too often reveal their own. — Vasily Grossman

One objective fact is that in 1939 there were 28 million Ukrainians, compared with 31 million in 1926, at a time when (barring famine) the birth rate was often twice the death rate. Deaths are calculated on this basis at anywhere between 2.4 and 4 million. More sophisticated studies give a figure nearer to 5 million. OGPU's tally from December 1932 to mid-April 1933 give a figure of 2.4 million deaths from famine and cannibalism; by extrapolating these — Vasily Grossman

Yet another Albert Grossman client. 225 At — Dennis McDougal

Honk!" he yelled. "Honk honk honk honk honk honk honk!"
His classmates agreed. — Lev Grossman

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

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. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you. — Lev Grossman

The law fights against life, and life fights against the law. — Vasily Grossman

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed. — Lev Grossman

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only. — Lev Grossman

Neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store
hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labor camp
they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be ... — Vasily Grossman

The multiverse was his TGI Friday's. — 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

He had never been to a party like this and it struck him as a little bizarre, like a feverish nightmare version of school. It was the exact same mass of people, but they had all shown up in the middle of the night, and now there were no teachers and everyone stood in the hallways talking as loudly as possible, and there were no classes except lunch, or else the classes were all different and he hadn't ever studied for any of them. — Austin Grossman

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again. — Lev Grossman

She had not yet sensed the pea beneath the pile of mattresses, the pea that belonged to the little brown-skinned girl who used to make up stories to keep her soul pinned down inside her or, at times, to let it fly - stories whose most exciting element was the word "suddenly" at the beginning of every sentence and before each description: Suddenly, suddenly, her heart would leap when she whispered to herself, suddenly. — David Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

By the time my first solo record came out, I was making a handsome living as a record producer. I had worked with the Band, Janis Joplin and all of these other artists in the Albert Grossman organization. So as my so-called solo career evolved, I never felt pressure that I had to come back and top when I might've done before. — Todd Rundgren

It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror.
More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I'd stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn't I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be? — Austin 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

At the same time there was the good of the poor and the good of the rich. And the good of the whites, the blacks and the yellow races ... More and more goods came into being, corresponding to each sect, race and class ... People began to realise how much blood had been spilt in the name of a petty, doubtful good, in the name of the struggle of this petty good against what is belied to be evil. Sometimes the very concept of good became a scourge, a greater evil than evil itself. — Vasily Grossman

Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe. — Austin Grossman

Welcome to Facelessbook: an antisocial network. — Lev Grossman

Nothing made you feel more like a fucking sorcerer than aviating under your own power. Yippee ki-yay, motherfuckers. — Lev Grossman

But where was he going to go, exactly? It was not considered the thing to look panicked or even especially concerned about graduation, but everything about the world after Brakebills felt dangerously vague and under-thought to Quentin. What was he going to do? What exactly? Every ambition he'd ever had in his life had been realized the day he was admitted to Brakebills, and he was struggling to formulate a new one with any kind of practical specificity. This wasn't Fillory, where there was some magical war to be fought. There was no Watcherwoman to be rooted out, no great evil to be vanquished, and without that everything else seemed so mundane and penny-ante. No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters. — Lev Grossman

That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn't make excuses, and it was never funny. — Lev Grossman

Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer. — 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 didn't get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do. — Lev Grossman