Lev Grossman

Some tiny sane part of him knew he was out of control, but that wasn’t the part of him that had its hands on the wheel.

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.

“It’s a funny thing about the old gods,” he said. “You think that just because they’re old they must be difficult to kill. But when the fighting starts, they go down just like anybody else. They aren’t stronger, they’re just older.”

Once magic was real everything else just seemed so unreal.

“Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic,” Fogg said expansively. “It doesn’t really make sense. It’s a little too perfect, don’t you think? If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.

“Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking: that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.”

Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.

His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he’d gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.

Just then, for an instant, the film of reality slipped off the spokes of its projector. Everything went completely askew and then righted itself again as if nothing had happened.

Sometimes I think you have an overly vivid imagination, Hollis. With some things it’s just not worth thinking about them too carefully before they happen. They almost never turn out to be as horrible as you think they will.

“I was just getting comfortable,” she said. “Gimme another sec.”

“You can have all the sex you want.”

You know what women are like? They’re like those long, skinny blocks you get in Tetris, the ones made out of four blocks straight in a row. First when you need them you can’t get any, then when you don’t need them anymore they’re fucking everywhere and you don’t know what to do with them.

“If there’s a bright side to the galaxy,” Peter said, more or less aimlessly, “we’re on the planet that’s farthest from it.”