Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman in 2023

Lev Grossman (born June 26, 1969) is an American novelist and journalist.

Quotes

Warp (1997)

Page numbers from the trade paperback second edition, published by St. Martin's Griffin, ISBN 978-1-250-09237-3, September 2016 (first printing)

• You know what women are like? They’re like those long, skinny blocks you get in Tetris, the ones made out of four blocks straight in a row. First when you need them you can’t get any, then when you don’t need them anymore they’re fucking everywhere and you don’t know what to do with them.
  • Chapter 2 (p. 33)

• “Maybe he was lying,” Peters said.
  “Lie is a blow to the tyranny of fact,” Hollis said….
  “I think lies are good,” he said. “People should lie more. Lies are like these little peepholes into a better world.”
  • Chapter 3 (pp. 47-48; ellipsis represents the elision of one sentence of description)

• “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.”
  • Chapter 3 (p. 49)

• “A Man, a Plan, a Bacchanal: Anomie,” said Peters, grandly.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 52; parodying the well-known palindrome: a man, a plan, a canal: Panama)

• “I was just getting comfortable,” she said. “Gimme another sec.”
  “You can have all the sex you want.”
  • Chapter 5 (p. 78)

• 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.
  • Chapter 6 (p. 91)

• 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.
  • Chapter 9 (p. 140)

• Who would’ve thought doing nothing all the time would turn out to be so damn tiring?
  • Chapter 12 (p. 175)

The Magicians (2009)

Page numbers from the trade paperback edition, published by Plume Books, ISBN 978-0-452-29629-9, May 2010 (first printing)

The chapters are not numbered in the book; they are numbered here for ease of reference

• 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.
  • Book 1, Chapter 1, “Brooklyn” (p. 5)

• 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.
  • Chapter 1, “Brooklyn” (p. 5)

• …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.
  • Chapter 1, “Brooklyn” (p. 7)

• 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.
  • Chapter 1, “Brooklyn” (pp. 8-9)

• “Well,” she announced cheerfully, “he’s dead!”
  • Chapter 1, “Brooklyn” (p. 11)

• 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.
  • Chapter 1, “Brooklyn” (p. 11)

• “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.”
  • Chapter 2, “Brakebills” (p. 19; ellipsis represents a minor elision for the sake of continuity)

• 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.
  • Chapter 3, “Eliot” (p. 37)

• Quinton didn’t know exactly how to put everything that was ridiculous about that idea in a single sentence.
  • Chapter 3, “Eliot” (pp. 37-38)

• 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.
  • Chapter 3, “Eliot” (pp. 41-42)

• Quentin had never met anybody so staggeringly and unapologetically affected.
  • Chapter 3, “Eliot” (p. 43)

• “Are you smart?”
  There was no non-embarrassing answer to this.
  “I guess.”
  “Don’t worry about it, everybody here is. If they even brought you in for the Exam you were the smartest person in your school, teachers included. Everyone here was the cleverest little monkey in his or her particular tree. Except now we’re all in one tree together. It can be a shock. Not enough coconuts to go round. You’ll be dealing with your equals for the first time in your life, and your betters. You won’t like it.”
  • Chapter 3, “Eliot” (p. 44)

• 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.
  • Chapter 5, “Snow” (p. 64)

• Once magic was real everything else just seemed so unreal.
  • Chapter 6, “The Missing Boy” (p. 72)

• 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.
  • Chapter 6, “The Missing Boy” (p. 79)

• 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.
  • Chapter 6, “The Missing Boy” (p. 88)

• “You’re an interesting case,” she said.
  There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected.
  • Chapter 7, “The Physical Kids” (p. 92)

• His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
  • Chapter 8, “The Beast” (p. 107)

• Just then, for an instant, the film of reality slipped off the spokes of its projector. Everything went completely askew and then righted itself again as if nothing had happened.
  • Chapter 8, “The Beast” (p. 111)

• It was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you.
  • Chapter 9, “Lovelady” (p. 133)

• “Age,” Quentin heard him mutter. “It’s wasted on the young. Just like youth.”
  • Chapter 10, “Marie Byrd Land” (p. 162)

• He had no interest in TV anymore—it looked like an electronic puppet show to him, an artificial version of an imitation world that meant nothing to him anyway.
  • Chapter 11, “Alice” (p. 167)

• Quentin’s conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater.
  • Chapter 11, “Alice” (p. 169)

• This was real, human sex, and it was so much better just because they weren’t animals—because they were civilized and prudish and self-conscious humans who transformed into sweaty, lustful, naked beasts, not through magic but because that’s who on some level they really were all along.
  • Chapter 11, “Alice” (p. 180)

• Even Quentin knew that using magic to alter one’s physical appearance never ended well. In the world of magical theory it was a dead spot: something about the inextricable, recursive connection between your face and who you were—your soul, for lack of a better word—made it hellishly difficult and fatally unpredictable.
  • Chapter 12, “Emily Greenstreet” (p. 188)

• “He’s so happy,” Eliot said dryly. “It’s like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.”
  • Chapter 12, “Emily Greenstreet” (p. 191)

• “The problem with growing up,” Quentin said, “is that once you’re grown up, people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.”
  • Chapter 13, “Fifth Year” (p. 199)

• Everybody has their own idiopathic reaction to their childhood home.
  • Chapter 13, “Fifth Year” (p. 202)

• “Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic,” Fogg said expansively. “It doesn’t really make sense. It’s a little too perfect, don’t you think? If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.
  “Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking: that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.”
  • Chapter 14, “Graduation” (p. 216)

• New York’s magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious.
  • Book 2, Chapter 1, “Manhattan” (p. 227)

• “Sure, but real life’s not actually like that,” Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. “You don’t just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You’re not going to be a character in a story, there’s nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn’t work like that.”
  • Chapter 4, “Upstate” (p. 268)

• He had reached the outer limits of what Fun, capital F, could do for him. The cost was way too high, the returns pitifully inadequate. His mind was dimly awakening, too late, to other things that were as important, or even more so.
  • Chapter 4, “Upstate” (pp. 268-269)

• They were crossing so many lines it was hard to figure out where they were anymore.
  • Chapter 4, “Upstate” (p. 273)

• It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either.
  • Chapter 4, “Upstate” (p. 275)

• Some tiny sane part of him knew he was out of control, but that wasn’t the part of him that had its hands on the wheel.
  • Book 3, Chapter 1, “Fillory” (p. 285)

• Anyway, the mood he was in, Quentin was willing to take any position on any subject with anybody if it meant he could pick a fight.
  • Chapter 2, “Humbledrum” (p. 304)

• We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.
  • Chapter 2, “Humbledrum” (p. 317)

• “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.”
  “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?”
  • Chapter 3, “Ember’s Tomb” (p. 333)

• The power to create order is one thing. The power to destroy is another. Always they are in balance. But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction.
  • Chapter 4, “The Ram” (p. 348)

• “Well, but why would You create something that had the power to hurt You? Or any of Your creatures? Why don’t You help us? Do You have any idea how much we hurt? How much we suffer?”
  A stern glance. “I know all things, daughter.”
  “Well, okay, then know this.” Janet put her hands on her hips. She had struck an unexpected vein of bitterness in herself, and it was running away with her. “We human beings are unhappy all the time. We hate ourselves and we hate each other and sometimes we wish You of Whoever had never created us or this shit-ass world or any other shit-ass world. Do You realize that? So next time You might think about not doing such a half-assed job.”
  • Chapter 4, “The Ram” (p. 349)

• “It’s a funny thing about the old gods,” he said. “You think that just because they’re old they must be difficult to kill. But when the fighting starts, they go down just like anybody else. They aren’t stronger, they’re just older.”
  • Chapter 4, “The Ram” (p. 353)

• Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it’ll only turn you into a monster.
  • Book 4, Chapter 1, “The Retreat” (p. 382)

• If he couldn’t go back, he would just have to do things differently going forward. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything.
  The funny thing about it was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered.
  • Chapter 1, “The Retreat” (p. 383)

• To be honest, Quentin felt superior to anybody who still messed around with magic. They could delude themselves if they liked, those self-indulgent magical mandarins, but he’d outgrown that stuff. He wasn’t a magician anymore, he was a man, and a man took responsibility for his actions.
  • Chapter 3, “Kings and Queens” (p. 394)

• In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster.
  • Chapter 3, “Kings and Queens” (p. 397)

• The irony was quite comprehensively hideous.
  • Chapter 3, “Kings and Queens” (p. 398)

• Nobody can be touched by that much power without being corrupted.
  • Chapter 3, “Kings and Queens” (p. 398)

The Magician King (2011)

Page numbers from the first American hardcover edition, published by Viking, ISBN 978-0-670-02231-1, first printing

• “I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit,” Eliot said. “Though that would explain a lot.”
  • Chapter 2 (pp. 20-21)

• 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.
  • Chapter 5 (p. 75)

• She was dipping a toe in the pool of bad behavior in finding the temperature was just right. It was fun being a problem. Julia had been very very good for a very long time, and the funny thing about that was, if you’re too good too much of the time, people start to forget about you. You’re not a problem, so people can strike you off their list of things to worry about. Nobody makes a fuss over you. They make a fuss over the bad girls.
  • Chapter 6 (p. 78)

• It was fair to call it depression. She felt like shit, all the time. If that was depression, she had it. It must have been contagious. She’d caught it from the world.
  • Chapter 6 (p. 80)

• If this was madness it was an entirely new kind of madness, as yet undocumented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She had nerdophrenia. She was dorkotic.
  • Chapter 6 (p. 81)

• Could the man really not have explained? Did his daughter really not understand what had happened? It didn’t add up. If they’d talked about it and figured things out it could have been a happy ending. People in fairy tales never just figured things out.
  • Chapter 8 (p. 95)

• “What do you call this style?” Quentin asked.
  “The mistake people make,” Bingle said, “is thinking that there are different styles.”
  “All right.”
  “Force, balance, leverage, momentum—these principles never change. They are your style.”
  • Chapter 8 (p. 97)

• 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.
  • Chapter 8 (pp. 97-98)

• “Be careful what you learn from me,” he said. “What is written with a sword cannot be erased.”
  • Chapter 8 (p. 98)

• He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.
  • Chapter 8 (p. 100)

• The sun set. The car smelled of its owner’s cigarette smoke. Everything was toxic and chemical and unnatural: the plastic walnut trim, the electric lights, the burning gasoline that was shoving them forward. This whole world was a processed petroleum product.
  • Chapter 9 (p. 111)

• He had gotten it so easy, and she had it so hard, and why? There was no good reason. He passed a test, and she failed it. That was a judgment on the test, not on her, but now her life was a waking nightmare, and he had everything he ever wanted. He was living a fantasy. Her fantasy. She wanted it back.
  • Chapter 12 (p. 144)

• Venice was the only city he’d ever seen that looked the same in real life as it did in pictures. It was consoling that something in this world met expectations.
  • Chapter 13 (p. 149)

• He couldn’t ignore how conspicuously beautiful Venice was. People had been living here for what, a thousand years? More? God only knew whose crazy idea it was to build a city in the middle of a lagoon, but you couldn’t argue with the results.
  • Chapter 13 (p. 150)

• “I started hanging out with this one girl, big-time warrior for one of the cities. She was very into the magic thing. And also I guess their menfolk weren’t especially well-endowed in the hardware aisle, if you take my meaning.”
  “I believe I grasp the essence of it, yes,” Quentin said.
  • Chapter 13 (p. 159)

• Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
  • Chapter 14 (pp. 165-166)

• They were joined by Julia, who kept her sunglasses on and ate only marmite, straight from the jar, which if anything seemed like further proof of her declining humanity.
  • Chapter 14 (p. 170)

• Specifically she was into dragons.
  Quentin suppose it was an extension of the general Australian preoccupation with fatally dangerous animals. Start with saltwater crocodiles and box jellyfish and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump up the food chain before you got to dragons.
  • Chapter 14 (p. 170)

• Welcome to Facelessbook: an antisocial network.
  • Chapter 15 (p. 184)

• It was too terrible to think about, so she dealt with it by not thinking about it.
  • Chapter 18 (p. 229)

• Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.
  • Chapter 18 (p. 232)

• She’d gotten good at coaxing. If all else failed she had the power of the bathroom handjob, and she wielded it with an iron fist.
  • Chapter 18 (p. 235)

• This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself.
  • Chapter 18 (p. 236)

• The man was obviously a soldier, but Quentin had never really thought about what that meant. He was a professional killer, efficient and businesslike. He had none of Bingle’s elegance. He was like a baker, except instead of making bread he made corpses, and he wanted to make Quentin into one.
  • Chapter 19 (p. 255)

• He threw his sword away. Screw swords. A magician doesn’t need a sword. A magician doesn’t need anything but what’s inside him.
  • Chapter 19 (p. 263)

• “Anyway, what’s wrong with a little unreality?” Quentin said. “Unreality is underrated.”
  • Chapter 21 (pp. 288-289)

• “Is that God?” Poppy said.
  “That is a god,” Penny corrected her. “Though that is really just a term to describe a magician operating on a titanic power scale.”
  • Chapter 22 (p. 302)

• “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.”
  • Chapter 22 (p. 302)

• “I don’t think they can change their minds. When you get to that level of power and knowledge and perfection, the question of what you should do next gets increasingly obvious. Everything is very rule-governed. All you can ever do in any given situation is the most gloriously perfect thing, and there’s only one of them. Finally there aren’t any choices left to make at all.”
  “You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.”
  “The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.”
  • Chapter 22 (p. 303)

• “Tell me, what’s the first thing a hacker does once he breaks into a system?”
  “I don’t know,” Quentin said. “He steals a bunch of credit card numbers and subscribes to a lot of really premium porn sites?”
  “He sets up a back door.” It was good to know that even having attained enlightenment Penny was still impervious to humor. “So that if he’s ever locked out, he can get back in.”
  • Chapter 22 (p. 305)

• That’s when they turned to religion.
  At this Julia pushed her chair back from the table. She could feel her intellectual gag reflex about to kick in.
  • Chapter 23 (p. 314)

• Religion had never been a subject that interested Julia. She considered herself too smart to believe in things she had no evidence for, and that behaved in ways that violated every principle she’d ever observed or heard plausibly spoken about. And she considered herself too tough-minded to believe in things just because they made her feel better. Magic was one thing. With magic you were at least looking at reproducible results. But religion? That was about faith. Uneducated guesses made by weak minds.
  • Chapter 23 (p. 314)

• Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.
  • Chapter 23 (p. 315)

• You know what Arthur C. Clarke said about technology and magic, right? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Turn it around. What is advanced magic indistinguishable from? Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from the miraculous.
  • Chapter 23 (p. 316)

• Apparently if you’re enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted.
  • Chapter 23 (p. 316)

• Where was the line between a spell and a miracle?
  • Chapter 23 (p. 330)

• 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.
  • Chapter 24 (p. 340)

• Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.
  • Chapter 24 (pp. 340-341)

• The dead didn’t mince words.
  • Chapter 24 (p. 348)

• “You went down the slide?”
  Benedict nodded.
  Quentin was evolving a theory about that. The slide was humiliating, that’s what it was. Deliberately embarrassing. That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.
  • Chapter 24 (p. 349)

• Nothing. Blue screen of death: she’d crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.
  • Chapter 25 (p. 361)

• It was strange to be naked in front of Pouncy after all the time they’d spent together clothed. 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.
  • Chapter 25 (p. 361)

• I’ll plead insanity. I can back it up.
  • Chapter 25 (p. 362)

• She wore a simple flowing white gown. So did everybody else. Gummidgy also wore a crown of mistletoe.
  So your basic Golden Bough deal, Julia thought. Fucking mistletoe. She never saw what all the fuss was about. Sure, it’s pretty enough, but at the end of the day it’s still a botanical parasite that strangles its host.
  • Chapter 25 (p. 367)

• Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it. Maybe it was all a game, that got crumpled up and thrown away at the end, but while you were here it was real.
  • Chapter 26 (p. 379)