Quotes From "The Magician King" By Lev Grossman

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. Lev Grossman

I guess we’re supposed to have faith.”“ I never really took you for the faith-having kind, ” Quentin said.“ I didn’t either. But it’s worked out so far. We’ve got five of the seven keys. You can’t argue with results.”“ You can’t, ” Quentin said, “but that’s actually not the same thing as having faith.”“ Why do you always try to ruin everything?”“ I’m not ruining it. I just want to understand it.”“ If you had faith you wouldn’t have to understand. Lev Grossman

Like wine, Provençal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. It concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief. Lev Grossman

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

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do. Lev Grossman

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues. Lev Grossman

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

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. Lev Grossman

Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it. Lev Grossman

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

He wanted to stick his finger in it and see what happened. Some story, some quest, started here, and he wanted to go on it. It felt fresh and clean and unsafe, nothing like the heavy warm lard of palace life. The protective plastic wrap had been peeled off Lev Grossman

What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn't an adventure? Lev Grossman

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

You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes, ” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals. Lev Grossman

Living in a castle is objectively romantic. Lev Grossman

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. Lev Grossman

...being around him wasn’t good for Quentin. He could feel himself regressing in the direction of an adolescent tantrum–it was like trying to talk to his parents. He lost all perspective on who he was and how far he’d come. Lev Grossman

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

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

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief. Lev Grossman