“That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“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, quote from The Magician King
“He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“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, quote from The Magician King
“Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“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, quote from The Magician King
“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, quote from The Magician King
“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, quote from The Magician King
“Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was trying to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders…”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“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, quote from The Magician King
“Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“Julia would do anything to make the time pass. She killed time, murdered it, massacred it and hid the bodies. She threw her days in bunches onto the bonfire with both hands and watched them go up in fragrant smoke. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes it felt like the hours had ground to a halt. They fought her as they passed, one after the other, like stubborn stools.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“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.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.”
“The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“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, quote from The Magician King
“Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was in love with Julia or just that he wanted to be in love with her, because it would be so comforting, such a relief, to be in love with her. It seemed like such a good idea. Was there really that big of a difference?”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“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, quote from The Magician King
“It's true," Eliot said. "Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don't spoil it.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“In one huge leather-gloved fist Jollyby held up a large, madly kicking hare by its ears.
'Son of a bitch,' Dauntless said. 'He caught it.'
Dauntless was a talking horse. She just didn't talk much.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn't an adventure?”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“A key part of successfully being Julia, it seemed, was not giving a shit if you looked weird.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
“There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician King
Lev Grossman
Born place: in Lexington, MA, The United States
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“Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost. While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.”
― M. Scott Peck, quote from The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“An hour of your life is worth more than a thousand people to me.”
― Nalini Singh, quote from Slave to Sensation
“She didn’t judge him or hate him for things that weren’t his fault. She accepted him and that was the greatest miracle of all.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Night Play
“Even my shoulder holster and the Browning matched. I had my backup gun in an inner pants holster. I also had two extra clips in my sport bag. I had replaced the knife I’d had to leave in the cave. There was a derringer in my jacket pocket and two extra knives, one down the spine, the other in an ankle holster. Don’t laugh. I left the shotgun home. If”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from Circus of the Damned
“It's as if the world is full of honeybees and I'm the only flower" -Elena”
― L.J. Smith, quote from Shadow Souls
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Raven's GateBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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