Top 250 Lev Grossman Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Lev Grossman

153. “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

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

— Lev Grossman

155. “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

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

— Lev Grossman

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Lev Grossman

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Lev Grossman

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Lev Grossman

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

— Lev Grossman

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

— Lev Grossman

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

— Lev Grossman

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

— Lev Grossman

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Lev Grossman

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

— Lev Grossman

188. “But the thing about monsters was, you couldn’t talk to them about it, because they wouldn’t admit they were monsters in the first place.”

— Lev Grossman

189. “He wanted to stick his finger in it and see what happened. Some story, some quest, started here, and he wanted to go on it. It felt fresh and clean and unsafe, nothing like the heavy warm lard of palace life. The protective plastic wrap had been peeled off.”

— Lev Grossman

190. “How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love; and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.”

— Lev Grossman

191. “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

192. “It wasn’t a place of worship, they explained, with a note of whinnying condescension, but a community devoted to the most absolute possible expression, or incarnation – or perhaps realization was an even better word – of the incomprehensibly complex but infinitely pure sylvan values of centaurhood, which Quentin’s fallen human brain could never hope to grasp. There was something distinctly German about the centaurs.”

— Lev Grossman

193. “Facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future.”

— Lev Grossman

194. “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

195. “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

196. “Lots of people say they’ve talked to dragons, but it’s very hard to verify. Supposedly the Thames dragon wrote most of Pink Floyd’s stuff. At least after.”

— Lev Grossman

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

— Lev Grossman

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

— Lev Grossman

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

— Lev Grossman

200. “Up through around twenty-five he’d never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand.”

— Lev Grossman