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.

I admit that you might possibly not be deluding yourself about that.

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.

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.

Has it crossed your mind that you don’t have to go off on a holy crusade every time things don’t go your way?

“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.”

When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won’t live in a wasteland. I’d rather die in paradise.

But of course You can get so much done when everyone thinks You’re dead. No interruptions. No one prays to a dead God, why would they?

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.