Lev Grossman

This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

But you couldn’t mourn forever. Or you could, but as it turned out there were better things to do.

Could the man really not have explained? Did his daughter really not understand what had happened? It didn’t add up. If they’d talked about it and figured things out it could have been a happy ending. People in fairy tales never just figured things out.

There was a lot to do. Death was an existential catastrophe, a rip in the soft upholstery with which humanity padded over a hard uncaring universe, but it turned out there were an amazing number of people whose job it was to deal with it for you, and all they asked in return were huge quantities of time and money.

The war we are losing is with time.

“Be careful what you learn from me,” he said. “What is written with a sword cannot be erased.”

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

He had gotten it so easy, and she had it so hard, and why? There was no good reason. He passed a test, and she failed it. That was a judgment on the test, not on her, but now her life was a waking nightmare, and he had everything he ever wanted. He was living a fantasy. Her fantasy. She wanted it back.

Where was the line between a spell and a miracle?

There was nothing—in Eliot’s admittedly limited experience—more tedious than virtue.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect.