Top 250 Lev Grossman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Onward and upward.”

— Lev Grossman

2. “If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so.”

— Lev Grossman

3. “It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.”

— Lev Grossman

4. “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

5. “I got my heart’s desire, and there my troubles began.”

— Lev Grossman

6. “The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.”

— Lev Grossman

7. “Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.”

— Lev Grossman

8. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

9. “Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.”

— Lev Grossman

10. “Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.”

— Lev Grossman

11. “Magic doesn’t come from talent, it comes from pain.”

— Lev Grossman

12. “Becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life.”

— Lev Grossman

13. “This isn’t how it ends!” Quentin said. “I am the hero of this goddamned story, Ember! Remember? And the hero gets the reward!” “No, Quentin,” the ram said. “The hero pays the price.”

— Lev Grossman

14. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

15. “And I’m not as young as I once was. At my age, I don’t have time to be bored.”

— Lev Grossman

16. “She was a goddess of darkness as well as light. A Black Madonna: the blackness of death, but also the blackness of good soil, dark with decay, which gives rise to life.”

— Lev Grossman

17. “It’s turtles all the way down.”

— Lev Grossman

18. “The problem with growing up is that once you’re grown up, the people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.”

— Lev Grossman

Featured in: Fun Quotes

19. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

20. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

21. “Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.”

— Lev Grossman

22. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

23. “Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it’s much too late.”

— Lev Grossman

24. “You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.”

— Lev Grossman

25. “Give a nerd enough time and a door he can close and he can figure out pretty much anything.”

— Lev Grossman

26. “I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.”

— Lev Grossman

27. “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

28. “Sometimes you just have to do things.”

— Lev Grossman

29. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

30. “I love playing with the conventions of fantasy, and breaking rules, and crossing lines.”

— Lev Grossman

31. “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

32. “Nothing a recovering addict likes more than a tale of how bad it had been in the old days, and how low a fellow addict had sunk. Let the one-downsmanship begin.”

— Lev Grossman

33. “Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.”

— Lev Grossman

34. “The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.”

— Lev Grossman

35. “The truth doesn’t always make a good story, does it?”

— Lev Grossman

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

36. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

37. “The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.”

— Lev Grossman

38. “Most people are blind to magic. They move thru 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.”

— Lev Grossman

39. “The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world.”

— Lev Grossman

40. “Free Trader Beowulf – you had to be at least forty and a recovering pen-and-paper role-playing-gamer to get the reference, but it was apt. Google it.”

— Lev Grossman

41. “If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.”

— Lev Grossman

42. “Escapism has value, even if I don’t know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it’s just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.”

— Lev Grossman

43. “A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.”

— Lev Grossman

Featured in: Strong Quotes

44. “Her white fox fur was coarse and smooth at the same time, and she made little yipping snarls every time he pushed himself deeper inside her. He never wanted to stop.”

— Lev Grossman

45. “Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.”

— Lev Grossman

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

46. “You can spend your life waiting and watching for perfect moments, but sometimes you have to make one happen.”

— Lev Grossman

47. “The past was ruins, but the present was still in play. They would have to tie him down to keep him from going to Ember’s Tomb.”

— Lev Grossman

48. “Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.”

— Lev Grossman

49. “This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.”

— Lev Grossman

50. “You don’t live in a castle full of spiral stairs without getting calves of adamantium.”

— Lev Grossman