Home > Work > The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)
61 " The thick plottens. "
― Lev Grossman , The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)
62 " Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer. "
63 " We have lived too long. The great days are past. "
64 " Funny how life had its little ways of surprising you. Little quirks of fate. "
65 " The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything. "
66 " 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 elsewhere, to somebody else, and he'd been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead "
67 " She was a person with her own hopes and feelings and history and nightmares. In her own way she was as lost as he was. "
68 " Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?""Oh, absolutely," Quentin said. "Maybe even more. "
69 " But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction. "
70 " 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. "
71 " 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. "
72 " When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slip through into Fillory...it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better. "
73 " Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it’ll only turn you into a monster. "
74 " You cannot study magic. You cannot learn it. You must ingest it. Digest it. You must merge with it. And it with you. "
75 " Quentin’s conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater. "
76 " Honk!" he yelled. "Honk honk honk honk honk honk honk!"His classmates agreed. "
77 " You don't have to do anything. This is what you don't understand! You don't know any older magicians except our professors. It's a wasteland out there. Out here. You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters. You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails. A lot of magicians never find it. "
78 " ...to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster. "
79 " No one gets punished for anything. We do whatever we want, and that's all we do, and nobody stops us, and nobody cares. "
80 " 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. "