Top 250 Lev Grossman Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “For a long time Eliot had had the theory that in Janet’s mind everybody was as judgmental of her as she was of them, and if that was true then the world must be a pretty scary place for her.”

— Lev Grossman

152. “There’s no getting away from yourself. Not even in Fillory.”

— Lev Grossman

153. “It’s natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.”

— Lev Grossman

154. “And why not do the easiest possible thing? Because isn’t that always the best thing?”

— Lev Grossman

155. “The year since then had been peaceful and prosperous, and in some ways the mood was lighter in the castle with Josh and Poppy installed as King and Queen in place of Quentin and Julia, Fillory’s brooders-in-chief.”

— Lev Grossman

156. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

157. “Reading the Fillory books you would think that all one has to do is behave honorably and bravely and all will be well. What a lesson to teach young children. What a way to prepare them for the rest of their lives.”

— Lev Grossman

158. “The librarian thought the problem was just that the right books weren’t breeding with each other and proposed a forced mating program.”

— Lev Grossman

159. “I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.”

— Lev Grossman

160. “Quentin hadn’t planned on spending the rest of his afternoon – or morning, or whatever this was – taking a standardized test on an unknown subject, at an unknown educational institution, in some unknown alternate climatic zone where it was still summer.”

— Lev Grossman

161. “He’s so happy,” Eliot said dryly. “It’s like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.”

— Lev Grossman

162. “No one gets punished for anything. We do whatever we want, and that’s all we do, and nobody stops us, and nobody cares.”

— Lev Grossman

163. “I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn’t destroy books.”

— Lev Grossman

164. “Until now, I’ve been a kind of binge-writer – I’ll carve out five or six hours on a weekend day and make a large container of espresso and just bang out a lot of words.”

— Lev Grossman

165. “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.”

— Lev Grossman

166. “People – me included – want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.”

— Lev Grossman

167. “A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn’t seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time – the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They’d have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves.”

— Lev Grossman

168. “Her depressive tendency, the flip side of her manic streak, was stirring. Why were they even doing this? it wanted to know. What a waste of time, of effort. Of pencils. Plum needed to get moving, but she was having trouble attaching meanings to things; the meanings kept peeling off like old stickers.”

— Lev Grossman

169. “I’m a fantasy writer. I don’t do SF. This is important to me. If you’re not clear on what genre you’re in, everything gets muddled, and it’s hard to know which rules you’re breaking.”

— Lev Grossman

170. “I think for a long time, I was paralyzed by some of my hopes and ideals for what my life was going to be like. I had this perfect vision of how my life should go, but it seemed – it was – impossible to realize, so I sat around for a long, long time doing almost nothing at all.”

— Lev Grossman

171. “There were things he’d been scared to face his whole life, and now that he was looking them in the eye they weren’t quite as scary as he first thought.”

— Lev Grossman

172. “The world around her, the straight world, the mundane world, had become to her a blowing wasteland. It was empty, a postapocalyptic world: empty stores, empty houses, stalled cars with the upholstery burned out of them, dead traffic lights swaying above empty streets. That missing afternoon in November had become a black hole that had sucked the entire rest of her life into it. And once you’d fallen past that Schwarzschild radius, it was pretty damn hard to claw your way back out again.”

— Lev Grossman

173. “The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that’s something people are looking for.”

— Lev Grossman

174. “My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.”

— Lev Grossman

175. “His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.”

— Lev Grossman

176. “Plum guessed it stood to reason that out of all these billions of books at least one of them had to be dragon porn.”

— Lev Grossman

177. “I’m happy to report that ‘The New Press’ is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern.”

— Lev Grossman

178. “This is a feeling that you had, Quentin, she said. Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many people ever experience. That’s where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.”

— Lev Grossman

179. “When I was 35 I realized that I was still thinking a lot about what it would be like to go to Narnia. To really go – not just in a daydream, or in a children’s book, but what it would actually feel like, physically, psychologically, every other way. The idea was haunting me.”

— Lev Grossman

180. “I’m not one of your knockabout, knuckle-scarred, Internet-controversy-courting book critics. Occasionally I stumble into controversy accidentally, but not because I enjoy it. It’s probably just because I’m a weird person.”

— Lev Grossman

181. “Welcome to Facelessbook: an antisocial network.”

— Lev Grossman

182. “It wasn’t time yet. You’ll find it again, if you look hard enough.”

— Lev Grossman

183. “Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do. That was the hard part, accepting that you didn’t get to choose which way you went.”

— Lev Grossman

184. “Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.”

— Lev Grossman

185. “Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.”

— Lev Grossman

186. “He and Janet talked like this all the time. The Fillorians didn’t really get it, they thought High King Eliot and Queen Janet hated each other, but the truth was that in Quentin’s absence Janet had become his principal confidante. Eliot supposed it was partly because they both found real romantic intimacy elusive and kind of uninteresting, so usually neither of them had a serious boyfriend, and they had to turn to each other for intelligent companionship.”

— Lev Grossman

187. “He was asked to draw a rabbit that wouldn’t keep still as he drew it – as soon as it had paws it scratched itself luxuriously and then went hopping off around the page, nibbling at the other questions, so that he had to chase it with the pencil to finish filling in the fur. He wound up pacifying it with some hastily sketched radishes and then drawing a fence around it to keep it in line.”

— Lev Grossman

188. “The Deeper Magic always seemed to come up when Ember didn’t feel like doing something, or needed to close a plot hole.”

— Lev Grossman

189. “I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that’s just what people did where I grew up.”

— Lev Grossman

190. “Some people need their families to become who they’re supposed to be. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But there are other ways to do it.”

— Lev Grossman

191. “Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there’s more to life than dreaming.”

— Lev Grossman

192. “With the traditional Australian’s indifference to personal dryness and venomous underwater predators, she dived right in.”

— Lev Grossman

193. “Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out.”

— Lev Grossman

194. “Whether or not he was in it, whether or not he could see or touch it, he’d thought there would always be a FIllory out there somewhere. He loved knowing it was there. It anchored his sense of happiness, the way a distant stockpile of gold might underwrite the value of a paper bill.”

— Lev Grossman

195. “He’d been free his whole life, if only he’d known it.”

— Lev Grossman

196. “He felt like he was coming back to life too. Not that he’d been dead, just... not quite alive. Something else.”

— Lev Grossman

197. “Being a writer can be isolating. It’s good to be among readers and booksellers.”

— Lev Grossman

198. “Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.”

— Lev Grossman

199. “Vile Father’s brown nipples, on the ends of his pendulous man-cans, were like dried figs.”

— Lev Grossman

200. “Read everything. If you haven’t read everything, you’ll never be able to write anything.”

— Lev Grossman