Top 100 Lev Grossman Quotes
#1. Hate isn't like love, it doesn't end. It goes on forever. You can never get to the bottom of it. And it's so pure, so unconditional!
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#2. And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.
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#3. 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.
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#4. 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.'
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#5. Some people need their families to become who they're supposed to be. And there's nothing wrong with that. But there are other ways to do it.
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#7. With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.
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#8. If my generation is remembered for anything, it will be as the last one that remembers the world before the Internet.
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#9. I hope," she said, "that you don't think you're going to keep me here with bacon." "Not
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#10. It was the strangest thing, but he was looking forward to everything so much, he could hardly stand it. He never would have believed it. He never thought he would.
"You know what?" He took Alice's hand. "Let's fly.
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#11. You. Killed. A. Hermit. You. Weird. Sweaty. Bastard!
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#12. Everything will be all right, She seemed to say, and whatever is not, we will mourn.
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#13. 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.
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#14. Do you know, I had almost lost faith in the goddess? I almost stopped believing in Her. But I realized I had to become something. I had to take what was done to me and use it to make myself into what I wanted to be. And I wanted this. And when I called Her, the goddess came.
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#15. I never went back to my room. I took the Fung Wah bus from South Station.
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#16. 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.
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#17. He looked like a child who had been slightly misdelivered, with some subpar forceps handling by the attending.
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#18. 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.
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#19. 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.
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#20. What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good.
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#21. There is something beyond freedom that people need: work, love, belief in something, commitment to something. Freedom is not enough.It's necessary but it'd not sufficient. It's what you do with freedom - what you give it up for - that matters
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#22. There's no getting away from yourself. Not even in Fillory.
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#23. 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.
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#24. It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.
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#25. Maybe there's a sense that technology isn't necessarily the answer to a lot of our problems. Fantasy offers readers a less radically alienated world - a world where desires and feelings that normally are trapped inside your mind are made real in the form of magic.
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#26. 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.
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#28. His bedroom was the gilded, diamond-studded, pearl-encrusted rococo lair of a god-king.
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#29. The quietness of it was weird: real fights happened without a sound track.
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#30. They were where he went when he couldn't deal with the real world, which was a lot.
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#31. My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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#32. It's not really possible to open 'The Casual Vacancy' without a lot of expectations both high and low crashing around in your brain and distorting your vision. There's no point pretending they're not there.
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#33. 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.
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#34. I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.
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#35. Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.
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#36. All of human literature could just be a user's guide to the multiverse!
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#37. She considered herself too smart to believe in things she had no evidence for, and that behaved in ways that violated every principle she'd ever observed or heard plausibly spoken about. And she considered herself too tough-minded to believe in things just because they made her feel better.
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#38. It wasn't time yet. You'll find it again, if you look hard enough.
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#39. Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn't get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do. That was the hard part, accepting that you didn't get to choose which way you went.
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#40. 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.
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#41. I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.
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#42. God, I hope we don't have to use that," was all he said out loud. "Oh, come on, Quentina. We're not looking for trouble. We just want to be ready if it comes." Josh could hardly contain himself. "Dungeons & Dragons, motherfucker!
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#43. This whole world was a processed petroleum product.
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#44. She hadn't even known they were volcanic, but now they were lobbing big seminal gobbets of lava all over their lower slopes, like a drunk prom queen puking on her dress. Shit was getting geological, yo.
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#45. They had a choice to make: go on, or go home.
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#46. Sometimes you just have to do things, Quentin," Julia said, as he climbed on board after her. "You spend too much of your time waiting.
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#47. 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
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#48. It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.
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#49. I've only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read 'The Long Walk,' one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read 'The Dark Half,' which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read '11/22/63.'
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#50. She started wearing black and listening to the Smiths and reading Camus
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#51. She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.
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#52. Never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink," he said. "Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn't drink.
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#53. I've got no other home to go to, not anymore. When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won't live in a wasteland. I'd rather die in paradise.
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#54. Awesome axes," Josh said. "Where did you - " "Your mom gave them to me," Janet said. "After I fucked her." "Why - " "Because she enjoyed it so much.
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#55. Every hangover feels like the worst hangover you've ever had, but this one was definitely a classic. One for the ages. He felt like all the water had been forcibly sucked out of his body, like an apricot in a dehydration chamber, and replaced with venom from an angry adder.
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#57. He's so happy," Eliot said dryly. "It's like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.
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#58. Though he found himself reluctant to be the direct cause of any actual killing. This wasn't Tolkien - these weren't orcs and trolls and giant spiders and whatever else, evil creatures that you were free to commit genocide on without any complicated moral ramifications.
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#59. In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, any more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows. He doesn't have to. He works with what he has.
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#60. The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they'd begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.
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#61. That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn't be unread.
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#62. I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually not as important as they're sometimes given credit for.
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#63. 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.
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#64. 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.
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#65. Humbledrum farted mournfully, three distinct notes.
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#66. The librarian thought the problem was just that the right books weren't breeding with each other and proposed a forced mating program. The library committee had an epic secret meeting about the ethics of literary eugenics which ended in a furious deadlock.
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#67. was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you - he
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#68. When he counted his change, he found only coins from the year he was born.
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#69. Becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life.
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#70. Language and reality are kept strictly apart - reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't.
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#71. The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world.
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#72. 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.
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#73. You cannot study magic. You cannot learn it. You must ingest it. Digest it. You must merge with it. And it with you.
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#74. Historical seen, said Alice, people have almost always have whrong when they have said that.
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#75. She was smart enough to know whose problem that was, and it wasn't hers.
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#76. Facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future.
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#77. You need to do more than memorize, Quentin. You must learn the principles of magic with more than your head. You must learn them with your bones, with your blood, your liver, your heart, your deek. He grabbed his crotch through his dressing gown and gave it a shake.
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#78. Would have to find something else, he thought mazily. Something new. Couldn't stay here anymore. Couldn't go back. Only forward.
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#79. I loved fantasy, but I particularly loved the stories in which somebody got out of where they were and into somewhere better - as in the 'Chronicles Of Narnia,' 'The Wizard Of Oz,' 'The Phantom Tollbooth,' the 'Dungeons & Dragons' cartoon on Saturday morning in the '80s.
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#80. I got my heart's desire, he thought, and there my troubles began.
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#81. A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
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#82. There is really no end to life's little humiliations.
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#83. We need to get some fauns up in this piece.
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#84. If being a hero is a matter of knowing your cues, like the fairy tale said, he'd missed his.
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#85. He felt like he was coming back to life too. Not that he'd been dead, just ... not quite alive. Something else.
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#86. But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction.
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#87. 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,
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#88. With the traditional Australian's indifference to personal dryness and venomous underwater predators, she dived right in.
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#89. The others were conspicuously silent, or talked among themselves, elaborately play-acting that they were unaware of the fact that Quentin was conversing with a drunk magic bear.
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#90. Living in a castle is objectively romantic.
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#91. Loyal prophets of an indifferent god" (on the topic of alcoholics, p.222)
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#92. It was always buzzing and singing and glowing and sparking to no particular purpose. Magic was decidedly imperfect. But the really funny thing, she thought, was that if it were perfect, it wouldn't be so beautiful. On
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#93. Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer.
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#94. The main advantage of being a reviewer is that you read a lot. A lot of books get sent to you, and you have an amazing vantage point from which to observe what's going on in contemporary fiction - not only genre stuff, the whole spectrum.
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#96. The end of the world is coming, and I should really be there for that." "Sure,
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#97. She'd been in math classes with Quentin since they were ten years old, and anything he could do she could do just as well, backward and in high heels if necessary.
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#98. The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?
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#99. I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books.
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#100. It was about damn time something happened.
Lev Grossman
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