“If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. 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. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“I have a little theory that I'd like to air here, if I may. What is it that you think makes you magicians?" More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical-question territory now anyway. He spoke more softly. "Is it because you are intelligent? Is it because you are brave and good? Is is because you're special?
Maybe. Who knows. But I'll tell you something: I think you're magicians because you're unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.
Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“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, quote from The Magicians
“It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost. ”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it? ”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. ”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“There is really no end to life's little humiliations.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“You can’t just decide to be happy.”
“No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“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, quote from The Magicians
“His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he'd gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“You can't just decide to be happy."
"No, you can't. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want? Do you want to be the asshole who went to Fillory and was miserable there? Even in Fillory? Because that's who you are right now."
There was something true about what Alice was saying. But he couldn't grasp it. It was too complex, or too simple. Too something...It was strange: he's thought that doing magic was the hardest thing he would ever do, but the rest of it was so much harder. It turned out that magic was the easy part.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“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, quote from The Magicians
“She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“Look, who's the talking bear here?” Quentin snapped. “Is it you? Are you the talking fucking bear? All right. So shut the fuck up.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“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.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
“The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians
Lev Grossman
Born place: in Lexington, MA, The United States
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“This man, who’d rushed in to hold together all the splintering pieces of my world and forced them back together before they were completely destroyed and unrepairable.
…
I felt bound to him in an unfathomable way.
As if when he’d been holding those splintering pieces together, the man had managed to chip away a small piece of my soul. A piece that would permanently belong to him.”
― A.L. Jackson, quote from Stand
“To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, he’s unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then *it* will be “here”. What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it *is* all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“Hillalum wondered what sort of people were forged by living under such conditions; did they escape madness? Did they grow accustomed to this? Would the children born under a solid sky scream if they saw the ground beneath their feet?”
― Ted Chiang, quote from Stories of Your Life and Others
“Long ago, there was a dream within a dream that allowed joy to reign, but that youthful breath drifted away as swiftly as a summer rain. There was nothing left after the dawn, except for a world darkened by a King’s broken heart. Now only Morpheus induced silhouettes dance in these lightless plains. They dance in sequence to the sound of time – unmoved by existence – trapped in a single thought I hope lies within you.”
― H.S. Crow, quote from Lunora and the Monster King
“[T]he radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, "The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational capitalism.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
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Institutes of the Ch...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.
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