Top 250 Lev Grossman Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “This whole world was a processed petroleum product.”

— Lev Grossman

203. “I never thought about doing a sequel when I was actually writing ‘The Magicians.’ I only ever considered it a standalone.”

— Lev Grossman

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

— Lev Grossman

205. “Even on the first day we invaded Plover’s house we sensed the conundrum that Americans are faced with in England: they’re too frightened of English people to behave rudely to them, and too ignorant to know how to behave politely.”

— Lev Grossman

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “I feel that’s one of the central questions of fantasy. What did we lose when we entered the 20th and 21st century, and how can we mourn what we lost, and what can we replace it with? We’re still asking those questions in an urgent way.”

— Lev Grossman

211. “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

212. “I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.”

— Lev Grossman

213. “Beer might help with that,” Quentin said. He felt punchy. “This could be the next clue. If it’s a talking beer, I mean a talking bear, we could, you know, talk to it.”

— Lev Grossman

214. “The problem was that Julia was smart, and Julia was interested in the truth. She didn’t like inconsistencies, and she didn’t let go until they were resolved, ever.”

— Lev Grossman

215. “That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny.”

— Lev Grossman

216. “I’ve learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it’s not what I thought it was. It doesn’t make you special and sparkly. You don’t have to walk alone. You can work in an office – I’ve worked in offices for the past 15 years and written five novels while doing it. The creative life is forgiving: You can betray it all you want, again and again, and no matter how many times you do, it will always take you back.”

— Lev Grossman

217. “But you couldn’t mourn forever. Or you could, but as it turned out there were better things to do.”

— Lev Grossman

218. “When he saw Julia, he searched himself for the old love he used to feel for her. It wasn’t gone, but it was a dull, distant ache, still there but healed over – just the shrapnel they couldn’t remove.”

— Lev Grossman

219. “The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.”

— Lev Grossman

220. “Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.”

— Lev Grossman

221. “Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.”

— Lev Grossman

222. “Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering.”

— Lev Grossman

223. “His first two months at Brakebills spun by, and soon red and gold leaves were scattering across the Sea, as if they were being pushed by invisible brooms – which possibly they were? – and the flanks of the slow-moving topiary beasts in the Maze showed streaks of color. Quentin.”

— Lev Grossman

224. “Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink,” he said. “Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn’t drink.”

— Lev Grossman

225. “June ripened into July, then burst and withered and dried and became August.”

— Lev Grossman

226. “A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors.”

— Lev Grossman

227. “Apparently if you’re enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted.”

— Lev Grossman

228. “Historical seen, said Alice, people have almost always have whrong when they have said that.”

— Lev Grossman

229. “Age is wasted on the young. Just like youth.”

— Lev Grossman

230. “Alone in his room, he smiled at his secret greatness.”

— Lev Grossman

231. “Julia picked at her food, managing a bite every few minutes, like her body was an unloved pet that she was being forced to babysit.”

— Lev Grossman

232. “They were where he went when he couldn’t deal with the real world, which was a lot.”

— Lev Grossman

233. “Nothing happened, then broke Poppys hand the smoth surface like the Lady in the lake, except thst the hand, instead of holding a magical sword, in this case only did a big, entusiastic thumb up-sign.”

— Lev Grossman

234. “Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it’ll only turn you into a monster. Better to stay home and do card tricks in your bedroom instead.”

— Lev Grossman

235. “It was a worrying trend. Everybody else was deep into their own stories, and all the stories were woven together just beneath the surface into a web that included Plum. But what was Plum’s story?”

— Lev Grossman

236. “The quietness of it was weird: real fights happened without a sound track.”

— Lev Grossman

237. “It didn’t feel like an exalted business – there was nothing grand about it. It hadn’t felt noble and righteous, it felt rough and ugly and bloody and cruel. It was what was necessary, that was all.”

— Lev Grossman

238. “There are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”

— Lev Grossman

239. “Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.”

— Lev Grossman

240. “He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping an uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters.”

— Lev Grossman

241. “Plus, magic just doesn’t feel like a tool. Can you imagine how boring it would be if casting a spell were like turning on an electric drill? But it’s not. It’s irregular and beautiful. It’s not an artifact, it’s something else, something organic. It feels like a grown thing, not a made thing.”

— Lev Grossman

242. “She just assumed that everybody shared her desire for everybody to be clear on everything, and she’d expect you to do the same for her.”

— Lev Grossman

243. “But perfection is a nervy business, because the moment you spot the tiniest flaw it’s ruined.”

— Lev Grossman

244. “And on and on, and it all sounded completely, horribly plausible. Any one of a thousand options promised – basically guaranteed – a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out? Why was he still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him? The professors Quentin talked to about it didn’t seem concerned at all. They didn’t get what the problem was. What should he do? Why, anything he wanted to!”

— Lev Grossman

245. “I’ve stayed in houses that were in the country, and in England, but I’m still not sure that I’ve stayed in an English country house.”

— Lev Grossman

246. “I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit,” Eliot said. “Though that would explain a lot.”

— Lev Grossman

247. “Julia didn’t laugh. She understood that she was looking at another person like herself, a broken person, but Pouncy was even more broken than she was. She was used to feeling sorry for herself, and angry at other people. She was less used at feeling sorry for someone else, but she felt it now. She would never be in love with Pouncy, but she felt love for him.”

— Lev Grossman

248. “Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one’s will to live.”

— Lev Grossman

249. “This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself.”

— Lev Grossman

250. “Whoever that hermit was, he obviously despised his fellow man, and that meant he was OK in Eliot’s book.”

— Lev Grossman