Top 100 Lev Grossman Quotes
#1. I think for Lev [Grossman], C. S. Lewis was a huge inspiration from his childhood. I know that Brideshead Revisited is a book that he's incredibly found of and he took certain structural influences from that book that he brought into The Magicians.
Hale Appleman
#2. My intention is always to honor the character that Lev [Grossman] created in the books and my greatest concern, honestly, is that the fans of the books will embrace me as this character that they've imagined in their heads.
Hale Appleman
#3. 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
#4. 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!
Lev Grossman
#5. Magic, Quentin discovered, wasn't romantic at all. It was grim and repetitive and deceptive. And he worked his ass off and became very good at it.
Lev Grossman
#6. Loosening his tie with one hand, Quentin stepped out into the cold clear winter air and flew.
Lev Grossman
#7. Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?"
"Oh, absolutely," Quentin said. "Maybe even more.
Lev Grossman
#8. We hunt the White Stag, like Quentin did. We catch it or shoot it or whatever you do with it. We get three wishes. We wish Fillory would last forever and not die. Done. Mischief managed." Eliot
Lev Grossman
#9. Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn't involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.
Lev Grossman
#10. His hair - cut your fucking hair already, you're not Alan Rickman - was lank.
Lev Grossman
#11. I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.
Lev Grossman
#12. 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.
Lev Grossman
#13. Quentin went to work on a bitter single malt Scotch that tasted like it had been decanted through the stump of an oak tree that had been killed by lightning.
Lev Grossman
#14. We found some of them. It was always either a fight
Lev Grossman
#15. You didn't get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
Lev Grossman
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. What's the fastest migratory bird on Earth?" "An airplane.
Lev Grossman
#19. Guy lives in a fantasy world without junk food or cars or trans fats or TV and he's still fat. You had to admire his dedication to the cause.
Lev Grossman
#20. Vile Father's brown nipples, on the ends of his pendulous man-cans, were like dried figs.
Lev Grossman
#21. And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.
Lev Grossman
#22. Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
Lev Grossman
#23. I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit," Eliot said. "Though that would explain a lot.
Lev Grossman
#24. 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
#25. What is the point of magic if we can't fix real problems?
Lev Grossman
#26. She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.
Lev Grossman
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. He'd been free his whole life, if only he'd known it.
Lev Grossman
#30. It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.
Lev Grossman
#31. 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.
Lev Grossman
#32. The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for.
Lev Grossman
#33. 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
#34. Growing up in the '70s and '80s, science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things.
Lev Grossman
#36. infinite corridor of panic that led nowhere.
Lev Grossman
#37. 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.
Lev Grossman
#38. Escapism has value, even if I don't know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it's just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.
Lev Grossman
#39. he'd fantasized about having nothing to do except lie on his bed and sleep and stare into space, but now those empty hours were here, and they were getting old amazingly fast.
Lev Grossman
#40. If my generation is remembered for anything, it will be as the last one that remembers the world before the Internet.
Lev Grossman
#41. What about Josh?" he croaked. "Go ask him." "He's got another project." Janet rolled her eyes. "He thinks he can use the Neitherlands to get to Middle-earth. He honestly believes he's going to bone an elf." "I
Lev Grossman
#42. At the top end you had some fairies squeeing at supersonic pitches; fairies thought all this military stuff was pretty silly, but they went along with it for the same reason that fairies ever did anything, namely, for the lulz.
Lev Grossman
#43. 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. He
Lev Grossman
#44. He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world-he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly,humiliatingly, just to get one sip of air.
Lev Grossman
#45. The higher you get the more you realize how much bigger than you everything
Lev Grossman
#46. I hope," she said, "that you don't think you're going to keep me here with bacon." "Not
Lev Grossman
#48. 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
#49. 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.
Lev Grossman
#50. You. Killed. A. Hermit. You. Weird. Sweaty. Bastard!
Lev Grossman
#51. Supposedly the Thames dragon wrote most of Pink Floyd's stuff. At least after Syd Barrett left. But there's no way to prove it.
Lev Grossman
#52. If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.
Lev Grossman
#53. Everything will be all right, She seemed to say, and whatever is not, we will mourn.
Lev Grossman
#54. She was the most beautiful, terrible thing he'd ever seen, like an acetylene flame, an incandescent filament, a fallen star right in front of him.
Lev Grossman
#55. Not that she was a know-it-all - it didn't seem to be an ego thing with her. She just assumed that everybody shared her desire for everybody to be clear on everything, and she'd expect you to do the same for her.
Lev Grossman
#56. That's it?" "That's it. And then you jump in. It's all just tradition. I mean,
Lev Grossman
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. The silver years of the Chatwins are long ago now, and the years since have been forged from baser metals. You
Lev Grossman
#61. 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.
Lev Grossman
#62. I never went back to my room. I took the Fung Wah bus from South Station.
Lev Grossman
#63. A key part of successfully being Julia, it seemed, was not giving a shit if you looked weird.
Lev Grossman
#64. 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
#65. 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.
Lev Grossman
#66. Are you kidding? That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog.
Lev Grossman
#67. He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping an uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters.
Lev Grossman
#68. Give a nerd enough time and a door he can close and he can figure out pretty much anything.
Lev Grossman
#69. Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
Lev Grossman
#70. We among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would.
Lev Grossman
#71. It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
Lev Grossman
#73. Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he'd stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn't want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever. "Don't
Lev Grossman
#74. The whole scene had a dreamlike quality, like a Chagall painting come to life.
Lev Grossman
#75. He looked like a child who had been slightly misdelivered, with some subpar forceps handling by the attending.
Lev Grossman
#76. Maybe she was crazy, but she wasn't stupid. She'd seen Terminator 2. She wasn't going out like Sarah Connor.
Lev Grossman
#77. 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
#79. And I need this. That's all I can tell you.
Lev Grossman
#80. 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
#81. I find that if you're a good student, the teacher hardly matters.
Lev Grossman
#83. 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
#84. I was perfectly happy where I was, deliquescing, atom by atom, amid a riot of luxury.
Lev Grossman
#85. Sometimes she looked so beautiful he couldn't believe she had anything to do with him. He could barely believe she existed at all. "But
Lev Grossman
#86. 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
#87. Quentin's conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater.
Lev Grossman
#88. 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
Lev Grossman
#89. 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
#90. There's no getting away from yourself. Not even in Fillory.
Lev Grossman
#91. 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
#92. Call the right axe Sorrow," she said. "You know what I call the left one?" "Happiness?" "Sorrow. I can't tell them apart.
Lev Grossman
#93. But you couldn't mourn forever. Or you could, but as it turned out there were better things to do.
Lev Grossman
#94. It was hard not to envy her. A phantom toll-booth, or a chariot of fire, probably. Drawn by thestrals.
Lev Grossman
#95. Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it'll only turn you into a monster.
Lev Grossman
#96. You're cramming a few chance data points into a story that has nothing to do with reality. You need to take a giant step back. Take a deep breath. You're way off the reservation." Nobody
Lev Grossman
#97. Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there's more to life than dreaming.
Lev Grossman
#98. 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.
Lev Grossman
#99. Tomorrow I'll take you out to see the gold beetles. They're amazing: they eat dirt and poop out gold ore.
Lev Grossman
#100. One, your hair is stupid. And two, I don't know what it's like where you come from, but if you ever do anything that could get me sent back to Brooklyn again, I won't just break your nose. I will motherfucking kill you.
Lev Grossman
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