Quotes from The Last Magician

“But then, liars do make the best magicians, and he happened to be exceptional.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“The only rule that counted was to not get caught.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“But then, people usually do miss what's right in front of them.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“She didn't have time to swoon over some boy, no matter how pretty he was.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“She kept him on his toes every time they met, so it was only fair he got to do the same. Never mind how much he was growing to like their games.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“Are you trying to blackmail me?” she asked.
“Not trying, no. Not yet, at least.” He smiled pleasantly, because he had the sense it would irritate her even more. “But give me time, and I might find something I want from you.”
She let out a derisive laugh. “In your dreams.”
He winked. “Every night, sweetheart.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“Don’t start telling yourself stories about me, Esta. I’m not some knight in shining armor. I don’t have some hidden heart of gold. I’m a bastard, in every sense of the word.”
“Who said I want you to be anything but what you are? I like your angles and your edges,” she told him, hoping he could hear the truth in her words. “I have plenty of my own, you know.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“Liars Make the best Magicians, and he happened to be exceptional!" taken from The Last Magician by Lisa Maxwell.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“Esta rolled down the window, letting the hot breath of summer rustle across her face. With it came the familiar smells of the city, stale and heavy with the metallic choke of exhaust and the ripeness of too many people sharing one tiny piece of land. But it was also enticing—the scent of danger and possibility that lived and breathed in the crowded streets. Dirty and frantic though it was, the city—this city—was home. She’d never wanted to be anywhere else.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“Standing to leave, he looked at her one last time, hating her and loving her just the same. She was yet another thing tying him to the city, his duty to her like a straitjacket holding him against his will. A locked box he couldn’t find a way out of.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“Order, the Bowery, the city itself. It was all the same to Harte. Each one was holding him down, holding him back. He’d throw them off one by one, until he was free, or he’d die trying.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“They were sitting on opposite sides of the board, playing each other in hopes of gaining the same prize.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“They weren’t so different, the two of them. They’d both been abandoned by their parents, but at least she’d had the Professor. He’d seen something in her worth saving, but Harte never had that. She still might not trust him, but she understood him. The drive that made him who he was, the determination to prove himself—the bone-deep need to belong somewhere—those were all things she knew very well. She understood the hurt, too. The fear that there was something intrinsically wrong with you to make the people who were supposed to love you leave. The way that fear either hardened you or destroyed you. It had turned into a sort of armor for her, another weapon in her arsenal, and she suspected the same was true of Harte.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

“He wished . . . He didn’t know what he wished. That he hadn’t seen the intentions behind those honey-colored eyes of hers? That he hadn’t predicted her duplicity so easily? Or maybe, stupid as he was, he wished that he could stop himself from the inevitability of hurting her? But wishes were for children, and he’d grown up a long time ago. Only one of them could win this game, and it had to be him.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician

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“Captain Lewis Nixon and I were together every step of the way from D-Day to Berchtesgaden, May 8, 1945 - VE-Day. I still regard Lewis Nixon as the best combat officer who I had the opportunity to work with under fire. He never showed fear, and during the toughest times he could always think clearly and quickly. Very few men can remain poised under an artillery concentration. Nixon was one of those officers. He always trusted me, from the time we met at Officer Candidate School. While we were in training before we shipped overseas, Nixon hid his entire inventory of Vat 69 in my footlocker, under the tray holding my socks, underwear, and sweaters. What greater trust, what greater honor could I ask for than to be trusted with his precious inventory of Vat 69?”
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“Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I'll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political." It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities." This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.
Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Thank you for keeping her safe," Elliott tells Will.
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