“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
See more on GoodReads
“I'd learned not to put a question mark where God put a period.”
― Cupcake Brown, quote from A Piece of Cake
“Among the peoples of the world I am not universally admired for the bell-like clarity of my diction. Words slide out of my mouth like fat fish. Having lived my life in various parts of Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas and having been sired by a gruff-talking Marine from Chicago and a grits-and-gravy honey from Rome, Georgia, what has remained is an indefinable nonspeech, flavored subtly with a nonaccent, and decipherable to no one, black or white, on the American continent.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from The Water is Wide
“Strike had always marvelled at the strange sanctity conferred upon celebrities by the public, even while the newspapers denigrated, hunted or hounded them. No matter how many famous people were convicted of rape or murder, still the belief persisted, almost pagan in its intensity: not him. It couldn't be him. He's famous.”
― Robert Galbraith, quote from The Silkworm
“Tu ai trup de animal, dar suflet de înger!”
― Jostein Gaarder, quote from Through a Glass, Darkly
“Are the dead as lonesome as the living?”
― Truman Capote, quote from Other Voices, Other Rooms
You Are a Badass: Ho...
Danny: The Champion...
Twisted Twosome
Sex Criminals, Vol....
Parcival: Ridder van...
BookQuoters 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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
