Quotes from The Magician's Land

“It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“...In books there's always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world's in danger, evil's on the rise, but if you're really quick and take this ring and put it in that volcano over there everything will be fine.

"But in real life that guy never turns up. He's never there. He's busy handing out advice in the next universe over. In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't. There's no answers in the back of the book.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“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, quote from The Magician's Land

“Drinks were a lot like books, really: it didn’t matter where you were, the contents of a vodka tonic were always more or less the same, and you could count on them to take you away to somewhere better or at least make your present arrangements seem more manageable.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“It was funny how just when you thought you knew yourself through and through, you stumbled on a new kind of strength, a fresh reserve of power inside you that you never knew you had, and all at once you found yourself burning a little brighter and hotter than you ever had before.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“He'd been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The word was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring - a moving oasis. He wasn't desolate, and he wasn't empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it, that's what being a magician was. They weren't ordinary feelings - they weren't the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone’s just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you’ve figured it out and done it, you’ll never know whether you were right or wrong. You’ll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn’t.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“we among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“This is a feeling that you had, Quentin, she said. Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many people ever experience. That's where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“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, quote from The Magician's Land

“It was a bookstore, and he felt at home in bookstores, and he hadn’t had that feeling much lately. He was going to enjoy it. He pushed his way back through the racks of greeting cards and cat calendars, back to where the actual books were, his glasses steaming up and his coat dripping on the thin carpet. It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“You only had to see a unicorn lay open the side of a centaur once, the ribcage flashing white when the ripped skin flopped down, to swear a mighty oath never to fuck with or even look at another unicorn again. I'm putting down the hearts and fluffy clouds and backing away slowly. Don't want any trouble here. You can have all the rainbows.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“I don't know how to phrase this exactly but what the fuck?”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“Give a nerd enough time and a door he can close and he can figure out pretty much anything.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“The world was fucking awful. It was a wretched, desolate place, a desert of meaninglessness, a heartless wasteland, where horrific things happened all the time for no reason and nothing good lasted for long.

He'd been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring - a moving oasis. He wasn't desolate, and he wasn't empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it, that's what being a magician was.
They weren't ordinary feelings - they weren't the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“The librarian thought the problem was just that the right books weren’t breeding with each other and proposed a forced mating program. The library committee had an epic secret meeting about the ethics of literary eugenics which ended in a furious deadlock.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“But you couldn’t mourn forever. Or you could, but as it turned out there were better things to do.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there’s more to life than dreaming.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“Facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“You love and you hate and you grieve and you don’t even feel it.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“Wishes are for children,” Jane Chatwin said. “I grew up.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“When he graduated he’d thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero’s journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn’t how it worked.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“But the thing about monsters was, you couldn't talk to them about it, because they wouldn't admit they were monsters in the first place.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“It turns out you can go home again, if you have to.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“He wished he could tell him that none of it was going to turn out anything like the way he hoped, but that everything was going to be all right anyway. It was hard to explain, but he would see.”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magician's Land

“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, quote from The Magician's Land

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“Gen 22:11–16a The story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac is traced to E. It refers to the deity as Elohim in vv. 1,3,8, and 9. But, just as Abraham’s hand is raised with the knife to sacrifice Isaac, the text says that the angel of Yahweh stops him (v. 11). The verses in which Isaac is spared refer to the deity as Yahweh (vv. 11–14). These verses are followed by a report that the angel speaks a second time and says, “… because you did not withhold your son from me….” Thus the four verses which report that Isaac was not sacrificed involve both a contradiction and a change of the name of the deity. As extraordinary as it may seem, it has been suggested that in the original version of this story Isaac was actually sacrificed, and that the intervening four verses were added subsequently, when the notion of human sacrifice was rejected (perhaps by the person who combined J and E). Of course, the words “you did not withhold your son” might mean only that Abraham had been willing to sacrifice his son. But still it must be noted that the text concludes (v. 19), “And Abraham returned to his servants.” Isaac is not mentioned. Moreover, Isaac never again appears as a character in E. Interestingly, a later midrashic tradition developed this notion, that Isaac actually had been sacrificed. This tradition is discussed in S. Spiegel’s The Last Trial (New York: Schocken, 1969; Hebrew edition 1950).”
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“What the Church wanted from you wasn't goodness; it was meekness. And I know because I've been meek for seventeen years. That's what you just called godliness. It's so much easier to be meek--to read the guidelines and submit and obey, instead of actually dealing with chaos, or pain--but that's not what good is.”
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“Yo, un chico judío, tenia que luchar para vivir todos los días en aquellos tiempos. No tenia otra opción. Él, un nazi con mucho poder, sí tenía opciones. Pudo habernos abandonado incontables veces, pudo haber huido llevándose su fortuna. Pudo haber decidido que su vida dependía de hacernos trabajar hasta morir, pero no lo hizo. En cambio, puso su propia vida en peligro cada vez que nos protegía, sin otra razón que porque era lo correcto. No soy un filósofo, pero creo que Oskar Schindler es la definición del heroísmo, Demostró que una persona puede hacer frente al mal y hacer la diferencia.”
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