Top 250 Lev Grossman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I’ve waited a long time for this,” Penny said. “Then this is going to be kind of an anticlimax,” Alice said, and she punched him in the face. Boom! Oh my God. It was beautiful, just like in a movie: straight from the shoulder, feet planted, hips rolled, follow-through, the works. Penny never saw it coming.”

— Lev Grossman

52. “Maybe there’s a sense that technology isn’t necessarily the answer to a lot of our problems. Fantasy offers readers a less radically alienated world – a world where desires and feelings that normally are trapped inside your mind are made real in the form of magic.”

— Lev Grossman

53. “He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”

— Lev Grossman

54. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

55. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

56. “The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all – in the end the vast majority of them simply aren’t that great, and are destined to be forgotten.”

— Lev Grossman

57. “Loosening his tie with one hand, Quentin stepped out into the cold clear winter air and flew.”

— Lev Grossman

58. “The real world is horrible.”

— Lev Grossman

59. “Every hangover feels like the worst hangover you’ve ever had, but this one was definitely a classic. One for the ages. He felt like all the water had been forcibly sucked out of his body, like an apricot in a dehydration chamber, and replaced with venom from an angry adder.”

— Lev Grossman

60. “The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.”

— Lev Grossman

61. “Something must be going on deep in his subconscious, he thought, some kind of redecoration, refurbishment, reupholstering that required a lot of downtime – some shadowy application running in the background, performing unknown operations, consuming huge chunks of psychic ram.”

— Lev Grossman

62. “She was passionately loyal, and if she was obnoxious it was only because she was so deeply tender-hearted. It made her easily wounded, and when she was wounded she lashed out. She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.”

— Lev Grossman

63. “I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. 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. “Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But.”

— Lev Grossman

64. “You hate yourself so much, you’ll hurt anybody who loves you. That’s it, isn’t it? Just to get even with them for loving you.”

— Lev Grossman

65. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

66. “She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.”

— Lev Grossman

67. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

68. “Living in a castle is objectively romantic.”

— Lev Grossman

69. “Hate isn’t like love, it doesn’t end. It goes on forever. You can never get to the bottom of it. And it’s so pure, so unconditional!”

— Lev Grossman

70. “Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he’d stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn’t want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever. “Don’t.”

— Lev Grossman

71. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

72. “There is really no end to life’s little humiliations.”

— Lev Grossman

73. “It was funny how just when you thought you knew yourself through and through, you stumbled on a new kind of strength, a fresh reserve of power inside you that you never knew you had, and all at once you found yourself burning a little brighter and hotter than you ever had before.”

— Lev Grossman

74. “It was too easy, and he’d had enough of doing things the easy way.”

— Lev Grossman

75. “But you know how there’s a certain kind of person – and it’s different for everyone – but suddenly when you see them your eye just snags on them, you get caught and you can’t look away, and you’re ten times more awake than you were a moment ago, and it’s like you’re a harp string and somebody just plucked you?”

— Lev Grossman

76. “Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.”

— Lev Grossman

77. “The memories were safe, sealed forever in amber.”

— Lev Grossman

78. “Wasn’t there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn’t they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?”

— Lev Grossman

79. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

80. “Everything will be all right, She seemed to say, and whatever is not, we will mourn.”

— Lev Grossman

81. “She didn’t mind if she died trying. Suicide was in everything she did now, and everything she thought. Suicide was her home: if she could find nothing else, then suicide would always have her.”

— Lev Grossman

82. “I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.”

— Lev Grossman

83. “The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything.”

— Lev Grossman

84. “With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.”

— Lev Grossman

85. “Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.”

— Lev Grossman

86. “He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world – he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly, humiliatingly, just to get one sip of air.”

— Lev Grossman

87. “It’s very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I’m writing. Rules come from genres. You’re writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That’s when really exciting things happen.”

— Lev Grossman

88. “We have lived too long. The great days are past.”

— Lev Grossman

89. “The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.”

— Lev Grossman

90. “I mean, when you’re tired of book reviews, you’re tired of life.”

— Lev Grossman

91. “Sometimes I think I am fate’s sword. She wields me cruelly.” Quentin wondered what it was like to be so unselfconsciously melodramatic. Nice, probably. “Right.”

— Lev Grossman

92. “Until then he’d worked hard, but he got in his share of malingering like everybody else.”

— Lev Grossman

93. “Now he knew his way around a ward-and-shield or two. He could chuck a magic missile with the best of them. He was a damn one-man magic-missile crisis.”

— Lev Grossman

94. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

95. “It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.”

— Lev Grossman

96. “Probably falling in love is always a little like that: You discover that one other person who understands what no one else seems to, which is that the world is broken and can never, ever be fixed. You can stop pretending, at least for a little while. You can both admit it, if only to each other.”

— Lev Grossman

97. “Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be.”

— Lev Grossman

98. “If being a hero is a matter of knowing your cues, like the fairy tale said, he’d missed his.”

— Lev Grossman

99. “It’s a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.”

— Lev Grossman

100. “There’s a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.”

— Lev Grossman