I got my heart’s desire, and there my troubles began.
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.
In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.
It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either.
If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so.
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
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.
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.
We’re wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn’t, we start looking around for the real world.
You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.
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.
He was in the right place. He was living his best life. How many other people in the multiverse could say that?
Becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life.
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.
You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
It’s time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.
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.
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.
If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.
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.
By the standards of magical society they’d fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn’t had the basic good sense to keep their shit to themselves.
I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don’t need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.
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.
What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn’t an adventure?
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.
If my generation is remembered for anything, it will be as the last one that remembers the world before the Internet.
You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.
You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn’t, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn’t. Put it in perspective.
It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.
…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.
I call the right axe Sorrow,” she said. “You know what I call the left one?” “Happiness?” “Sorrow. I can’t tell them apart.
Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first.
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.
The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn’t love?
I just completed a long car trip on a Sunday in August with two small children, which believe me is enough to convince you that Samuel Beckett was right about everything.
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!
Personally, I think the “Potter” books have too many adverbs and not enough sex.
Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they’re made, they never seem quite as sacred again.
I’ve drunk Amazon’s free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I’m not anti-Amazon, and I’m not pro-publishers either. I’m pro-books.