Lev Grossman

They were crossing so many lines it was hard to figure out where they were anymore.

All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn’t be it. It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he’d been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead.

“You’re an interesting case,” she said.

There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected.

If he couldn’t go back, he would just have to do things differently going forward. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything.

The funny thing about it was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered.

To be honest, Quentin felt superior to anybody who still messed around with magic. They could delude themselves if they liked, those self-indulgent magical mandarins, but he’d outgrown that stuff. He wasn’t a magician anymore, he was a man, and a man took responsibility for his actions.

His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.

Quinton didn’t know exactly how to put everything that was ridiculous about that idea in a single sentence.

“Well, but why would You create something that had the power to hurt You? Or any of Your creatures? Why don’t You help us? Do You have any idea how much we hurt? How much we suffer?”

A stern glance. “I know all things, daughter.”

“Well, okay, then know this.” Janet put her hands on her hips. She had struck an unexpected vein of bitterness in herself, and it was running away with her. “We human beings are unhappy all the time. We hate ourselves and we hate each other and sometimes we wish You of Whoever had never created us or this shit-ass world or any other shit-ass world. Do You realize that? So next time You might think about not doing such a half-assed job.”

Everybody has their own idiopathic reaction to their childhood home.

But now that the ripened fruit of all that preparation was right in front of him he suddenly lost any desire for it. He wasn’t surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you’ve done all the work to get something you don’t even want it anymore. He had it all the time. It was one of the few things he could depend on.

“I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit,” Eliot said. “Though that would explain a lot.”

New York’s magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious.