Top 280 Lev Grossman Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 6

251. “It’s a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you’re supposed to like it.”

— Lev Grossman

252. “Its composure thoroughly disrupted, the little treelet, the picture of arboreal distress, let its branches droop a little, and its green birch leaves fluttered anxiously.”

— Lev Grossman

253. “Sorry”, Elliot said. “But you were kissing everybody else.”

— Lev Grossman

254. “For a certain kind of person there is literally nothing nicer than eating breakfast by yourself on a moving train with a good book.”

— Lev Grossman

255. “Bzzt!” Eliot pressed an imaginary game-show button on the arm of the chair. “The answer I was looking for was, ‘She’s not my girlfriend, she’s a crazy magic rage-demon.”

— Lev Grossman

256. “If you please, Admiral, don’t be a cock. I’ll know it when I see it, and if, for some reason, I don’t, you tell me, alright?” Admiral Lacker inclined his head almost imperceptibly to indicate that they had a deal. He would endeavor to be as little of a cock as possible.”

— Lev Grossman

257. “He wished he could tell him that none of it was going to turn out anything like the way he hoped, but that everything was going to be all right anyway. It was hard to explain, but he would see.”

— Lev Grossman

258. “At this moment his dearest wish would have been just a moment’s grace to immerse his face in a sinkfull of warm water. And maybe to have somebody hold him under till he drowned.”

— Lev Grossman

259. “The bear, it emerged, drank only peach schnapps, which it sipped from delicate thimble-size glasses.”

— Lev Grossman

260. “Privately Kate thought that for a guy in a banana-yellow suit he was turning out to be a pretty sharp operator.”

— Lev Grossman

261. “The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn’t love?”

— Lev Grossman

262. “All boys need a father’s love, and they’ll do anything to get it, and Arthur had tried being good, and it hadn’t worked, so that left only greatness. Perfection. If only, if only Arthur had had a father there to say, it’s all right, this is good enough. You can stop now, I will love you whatever happens, whatever you do, whoever you are. But there was no one there to say it. God would never say stop. And so Arthur never would.”

— Lev Grossman

263. “Of all the animals,” she said, “only man can feel a despair that is beyond his power to endure.”

— Lev Grossman

264. “They think i’m at a special school for computer geeks and homosexuals.”

— Lev Grossman

265. “He looked up at the empty clouds, and as he died he wondered, not for the first time but for the very last, why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one.”

— Lev Grossman

266. “It was a good story. It made him feel better. Stories were useful that way.”

— Lev Grossman

267. “Adventures were quick and exciting when you heard about them, but when you were inside one they happened very, very slowly.”

— Lev Grossman

268. “One day you will see that it is a mistake to love an empire, or a throne, or a crown, because those things cannot love. They can only die.”

— Lev Grossman

269. “What does it mean, Bedivere? I wanted to be good, and I wanted to serve God, and I found I could not do both.”

— Lev Grossman

270. “But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled one into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends.”

— Lev Grossman

271. “A lot of heroes hate themselves, it’s why they work so hard to make everybody love them.”

— Lev Grossman

272. “Plum’s own romantic history so far had been pretty limited, with minimal drama. It was one area where she felt comfortable lagging behind her peers. But she prided herself on her powerful philosophical insights into other people’s relationships.”

— Lev Grossman

273. “He couldn’t stop himself, it was like he craved humiliation, like he had a perverse compulsion to see the greatest in the land and to prove to himself and them and the whole world once and for all how definitively unworthy he really was.”

— Lev Grossman

274. “Years later he would discover that in Britain it was customary for a fourth son to carry the image of a swift on his shield, because a swift was a bird that was believed to have no feet and spent its entire life on the wing, never landing, from birth to death.”

— Lev Grossman

275. “He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world – he’d spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was. He wasn’t going to be suckered in just like that. It was like finding a clue that somebody you’d buried and mourned wasn’t really dead after all.”

— Lev Grossman

276. “It has all cost so much, and come to so little. There’s so much unfinished. But I cannot stay here. I thought I could, but I was mistaken. The world is sea-changed now, and I fear I belong to the Old World. “But this world has marvels in it too. Never doubt it.” Now he looked straight at Collum. “They are of a different kind now. No one will hand them to you. You can’t pull them out of a stone, the way I did, but they’re still there. It’s not too late.”

— Lev Grossman

277. “Britannia was a weird place, no question. Growing up in a Mediterranean clime, Scipio never imagined in a thousand years that he would come here. Britannia was so cold and distant and insular and northerly as to be almost mythological, a miserably damp demi-realm confabulated out of gray stone and wet leaves and coarse grass. A different sun hung over Britain, a worn, debased tin version of the great golden coin that stared unblinking down at Rome.”

— Lev Grossman

278. “Personal violence did not come naturally to Eliot; in fact he had found it distasteful. What could he say, he was a sensitive individual, fate had blessed and cursed him with a tender heart.”

— Lev Grossman

279. “He knew it for a certainty. It was coming, and then it would have happened. Time was always stealing away bits of your future and replacing them with memories, and then the memories faded. Like trading real gold for fairy gold, and who thought that was a fair trade? But God must, or He wouldn’t have made time that way.”

— Lev Grossman

280. “I thought about what time is, how we’re broken every second, we’re losing moments all the time, leaking them away like a stuffed animal losing its stuffing, until one day they’re gone an we lose everything. Forever. And then, at the same time, we’re gaining seconds, moment after moment. Every one is a gift, until at the end of our lives we’re sitting on a rich hoard of moments. Rich beyond imaging. Time was both those things at once.”

— Lev Grossman

281. “What fuel kept that furnace burning so bright and so hot? All fires consume something. It seemed to Palomides that a fire that is not fed, yet still burns, must be consuming itself.”

— Lev Grossman

282. “Right. You might just think about climbing down from there.” He was using that cautious tone you use when you’re trying to reason with a cat.”

— Lev Grossman

283. “The world had tried to teach him to hate himself, but he’d seen through the lie and understood who he was. They carried scars, both of them, but scars were tougher than skin.”

— Lev Grossman

284. “God wouldn’t’ve sent him more than he could endure.” “I find your God is a great optimist when it comes to the question of how much people can endure.”

— Lev Grossman