Lev Grossman
150 quotes
Biography
Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist who wrote the Magicians trilogy: The Magicians (2009), The Magician King (2011), and The Magician's Land (2014). He was the book critic and lead technology writer at Time magazine from 2002 to 2016.
"If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so."
"I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began."
"[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."
"The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?"
"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."
"“If there’s a bright side to the galaxy,” Peter said, more or less aimlessly, “we’re on the planet that’s farthest from it.”"
"“A Man, a Plan, a Bacchanal: Anomie,” said Peters, grandly."
"I just thought of this—it’s the American university system. This is my new theory: the New Feudalism. You go to college and you get used to living like some kind of medieval overlord, with people waiting on you and everything, and it warps your mind. It happens to everybody. By the time you graduate you have all the personal habits of an aristocrat, and none of the money. No wonder you’re dysfunctional—you’re a twentieth-century office temp who’s channeling a nobleman in the British Raj."
"Sometimes I think you have an overly vivid imagination, Hollis. With some things it’s just not worth thinking about them too carefully before they happen. They almost never turn out to be as horrible as you think they will."
"Who would’ve thought doing nothing all the time would turn out to be so damn tiring?"
"But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn’t happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn’t think what else to do."
"All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn’t be it. It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he’d been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead."
"…it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better."
"But now that the ripened fruit of all that preparation was right in front of him he suddenly lost any desire for it. 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. He had it all the time. It was one of the few things he could depend on."
"“Well,” she announced cheerfully, “he’s dead!”"
"Quentin wished she weren’t so attractive. Unpretty women were so much easier to deal with in someways—you didn’t have to face the pain of their probable unattainability."
"“The Dean will probably be down to get you in another minute,” Eliot said. “Here’s my advice. Sit there…and try to look like you belong here. And if you tell him you saw me smoking, I will banish you to the lowest circle of hell. Which I’ve never been there, but if even half of what I hear is true it’s almost as bad as Brooklyn.”"
"He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world—he’d spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was."
"Quinton didn’t know exactly how to put everything that was ridiculous about that idea in a single sentence."
"He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping and uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters. It wasn’t something he had much practice at."
"Quentin had never met anybody so staggeringly and unapologetically affected."
"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."
"Once magic was real everything else just seemed so unreal."
"A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors."
"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."