Lev Grossman

She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future.

Heads turned. This was gossip of the very first water—pure pharmaceutical-grade gossip.

One of the secrets Martin must have learned down below the Northern Marsh was how not to care about some things, and there was power in that, the power to live as though his actions had no consequences. It fell to us to witness the consequences, and they were ugly.

“Wishes are for children,” Jane Chatwin said. “I grew up.”

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

“And I think I’ve figured out how. I think I finally know how to fix everything.”

“Historically speaking,” Alice said, “when people have said that they’ve almost always been wrong.”

It was funny about magic, how messy and imperfect it was. When people said something worked like magic they meant that it cost nothing and did exactly what you wanted it to. But there were lots of things magic couldn’t do. It couldn’t raise the dead. It couldn’t make you happy. He couldn’t make you good-looking. And even with the things it could do, it didn’t always do them right. And it always, always cost something.

He’d always half expected that the watch would turn out to have some sort of amazing magical power—turning back time, maybe, or slowing it, or freezing it, or something. It certainly looked magical enough. But if it had any powers at all he’d never found them. Funny how some things you’re sure will pay off never do.

She wondered if later on she would wish she hadn’t looked. That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.

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

If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.

She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else.