Top 250 Lev Grossman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Supposedly I’ve got traces of an English accent, though I can’t hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who’s English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.”

— Lev Grossman

102. “We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.”

— Lev Grossman

103. “Fresh tobacco. Black currants. God, it was so good. She kept it in her mouth for a count of ten before she swallowed. If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine. She smelled wet hay from a tumbledown field in Tuscany in the early morning, after the sky turned light, but before the sun burned off the dew.”

— Lev Grossman

104. “Magic, Quentin discovered, wasn’t romantic at all. It was grim and repetitive and deceptive. And he worked his ass off and became very good at it.”

— Lev Grossman

105. “Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.”

— Lev Grossman

106. “It’s wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.”

— Lev Grossman

107. “He almost felt like he was betraying Julia. But what did he owe her? It’s not like she even would have cared. And Professor Sunderland was here. He wanted somebody who was part of his new world. Julia had her chance.”

— Lev Grossman

108. “Sometimes he looked at her and thought, Gosh, I wonder what’s underneath all that anger, all that hard glossy armor? Maybe there’s just an innocent, wounded little girl in there who wants to come out and play and be loved and get happy. But now he wondered if maybe that little girl was long gone, or if she’d ever been there at all. What was under all that armor, all that anger? More anger, and more armor. Anger and armor, all the way down.”

— Lev Grossman

109. “It’s true,” Eliot said. “Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don’t spoil it.”

— Lev Grossman

110. “I never went back to my room. I took the Fung Wah bus from South Station.”

— Lev Grossman

111. “And at that moment, out of nowhere, Janet knew that she herself would never have children. Probably she’d known it for a while, but it was the first time she’d admitted it to herself. Let others breed. Let them, and God be with them. She would be the witness – she was tough enough to see everything break and not break herself. They also serve who fly around on hippogriffs and watch.”

— Lev Grossman

112. “Do you know, I had almost lost faith in the goddess? I almost stopped believing in Her. But I realized I had to become something. I had to take what was done to me and use it to make myself into what I wanted to be. And I wanted this. And when I called Her, the goddess came.”

— Lev Grossman

113. “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

114. “You don’t want to move toward some utopian literary situation where everybody’s free of all conventions. That’s ridiculous! Conventions are what you need. You have nothing to break down if you don’t have conventions.”

— Lev Grossman

115. “I don’t know if I’ve ever derived such an immediate sense of calm and well-being from any book as I did from ‘Right Ho, Jeeves.’ It was like I was Pac-Man and the book was a power-up.”

— Lev Grossman

116. “He had an air of magnificent melancholy sophistication, as if his proper place were elsewhere, somewhere infinitely more compelling even than Brakebills, and he’d been confined to his present setting by a grotesque divine oversight, which he tolerated with as much good humor as could be expected.”

— Lev Grossman

117. “Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.”

— Lev Grossman

118. “It was hard not to envy her. A phantom toll-booth, or a chariot of fire, probably. Drawn by thestrals.”

— Lev Grossman

119. “The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.”

— Lev Grossman

120. “He was in the right place. He was living his best life. How many other people in the multiverse could say that?”

— Lev Grossman

121. “She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.”

— Lev Grossman

122. “I’ve got no other home to go to, not anymore. When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won’t live in a wasteland. I’d rather die in paradise.”

— Lev Grossman

123. “There must still be some last invisible unbroken strand connecting them, something deeper than mourning. The wound had healed but the scar wouldn’t fade, not quite.”

— Lev Grossman

124. “It’s an engrossing look at the way the flow of information shapes history-as well as a rare glimpse into the soul of the hardcore geek.”

— Lev Grossman

125. “Based on what he had overheard, one of his classmates had placed second in the Putnam Competition, as a high school junior. He knew for a fact that one of the girls had managed to take over the plenary session of the national model UN and push through a motion sanctioning the use of nuclear weapons to protect a critically endangered species of sea turtle. This while representing Lesotho.”

— Lev Grossman

126. “If this was madness it was an entirely new kind of madness, as yet undocumented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She had nerdophrenia. She was dorkotic.”

— Lev Grossman

127. “A new thought happens and a new plant springs up. A feeling fades away and the plant dies. Some of the more common ones are always in bloom – fear, anger, happiness, love, envy. They’re quite unruly, they grow like weeds. Certain basic mathematical ideas never go away either. But others are quite rare. Complex concepts, extreme or subtle emotions. Awe and wonder are harder to find than they once were.”

— Lev Grossman

128. “Guy lives in a fantasy world without junk food or cars or trans fats or TV and he’s still fat. You had to admire his dedication to the cause.”

— Lev Grossman

129. “More lies. But what could you do? That’s how you roll when you’re a teenage magician!”

— Lev Grossman

130. “Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed. They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: James, Julia, and Quentin. James and Julia held hands. That’s how things were now. The sidewalk wasn’t quite wide enough, so Quentin trailed after them, like a sulky child. He would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone period, but you couldn’t have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.”

— Lev Grossman

131. “I will stop being a mouse, Quentin. I will take some chances. If you will, for just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. 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.”

— Lev Grossman

132. “He was unexpectedly happy, though he instinctively kept it a secret.”

— Lev Grossman

133. “She was young enough that all she had to do was kid things, but she was also getting old enough that she wanted to do more than play games and pretend.”

— Lev Grossman

134. “I recognize that on paper, you can’t really tell that I’m a fan or a nerd.”

— Lev Grossman

135. “As a writer I’m more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.”

— Lev Grossman

136. “Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.”

— Lev Grossman

137. “I find that if you’re a good student, the teacher hardly matters.”

— Lev Grossman

138. “The main advantage of being a reviewer is that you read a lot. A lot of books get sent to you, and you have an amazing vantage point from which to observe what’s going on in contemporary fiction – not only genre stuff, the whole spectrum.”

— Lev Grossman

139. “A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I’ve just gotten in the habit of forgiving.”

— Lev Grossman

140. “It’s time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.”

— Lev Grossman

141. “You love and you hate and you grieve and you don’t even feel it.”

— Lev Grossman

142. “And Quentin had never known how the Maze was redrawn over the summer, but apparently every year in June the groundskeeper goaded the topiary animals into such a feeding frenzy that they fell upon and devoured each other in a kind of ghastly slow-motion vegetarian holocaust.”

— Lev Grossman

143. “My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.”

— Lev Grossman

144. “You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.”

— Lev Grossman

145. “It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended.”

— Lev Grossman

146. “It would be like Prospero’s island, but in a good way: not a country of exile, a model world, safe and peaceful and private. A magician’s land.”

— Lev Grossman

147. “I think every fantasy reader secretly believes they know how magic works.”

— Lev Grossman

148. “And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her parents asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.”

— Lev Grossman

149. “He’d thought he’d known what his future looked like, but he’d been mistaken. His life would be something else now. He was starting over, only he didn’t think he had the strength to start over. He didn’t know if he could stand up.”

— Lev Grossman

150. “They went around the room telling stories about how they’d gotten here. No two were exactly the same, but there was always a certain family resemblance. Somebody went looking for a lost ball in an alley, or a stray goat in a drainage ditch, or fallowed an inexplicable extra cable in the high school computer room which led to a server closet that had never been there before.”

— Lev Grossman