Lev Grossman

“Age,” Quentin heard him mutter. “It’s wasted on the young. Just like youth.”

“The Dean will probably be down to get you in another minute,” Eliot said. “Here’s my advice. Sit there…and try to look like you belong here. And if you tell him you saw me smoking, I will banish you to the lowest circle of hell. Which I’ve never been there, but if even half of what I hear is true it’s almost as bad as Brooklyn.”

It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either.

“Well,” she announced cheerfully, “he’s dead!”

“Are you smart?”

There was no non-embarrassing answer to this.

“I guess.”

“Don’t worry about it, everybody here is. If they even brought you in for the Exam you were the smartest person in your school, teachers included. Everyone here was the cleverest little monkey in his or her particular tree. Except now we’re all in one tree together. It can be a shock. Not enough coconuts to go round. You’ll be dealing with your equals for the first time in your life, and your betters. You won’t like it.”

It was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you.

The power to create order is one thing. The power to destroy is another. Always they are in balance. But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction.

He had reached the outer limits of what Fun, capital F, could do for him. The cost was way too high, the returns pitifully inadequate. His mind was dimly awakening, too late, to other things that were as important, or even more so.

This was real, human sex, and it was so much better just because they weren’t animals—because they were civilized and prudish and self-conscious humans who transformed into sweaty, lustful, naked beasts, not through magic but because that’s who on some level they really were all along.

Quentin had never met anybody so staggeringly and unapologetically affected.

Nobody can be touched by that much power without being corrupted.

Even Quentin knew that using magic to alter one’s physical appearance never ended well. In the world of magical theory it was a dead spot: something about the inextricable, recursive connection between your face and who you were—your soul, for lack of a better word—made it hellishly difficult and fatally unpredictable.