Lev Grossman Quotes - Page 2

You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.

Blue screen of death: she'd crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.

She was the most beautiful, terrible thing he'd ever seen, like an acetylene flame, an incandescent filament, a fallen star right in front of him.

Emily Greenstreet was one of these girls that nobody ever notices, who are only friends with other girls nobody notices. Nobody likes or dislikes them. They have weak chins, or chicken-pox scars, or their glasses are too big. I know I'm being mean. But you know, they're just sort of at the edge of everything.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

I read obsessively when I'm writing. I think there are two kinds of fiction writers, those who read incessantly while they write and those who can't read at all, lest their individual voices get overwhelmed, or tainted somehow. I'm the first kind. To use a painfully precious metaphor, I need fixed stars to navigate by, otherwise I get lost in the blankness of the page.

I guess we’re supposed to have faith.”“I never really took you for the faith-having kind,” Quentin said.“I didn’t either. But it’s worked out so far. We’ve got five of the seven keys. You can’t argue with results.”“You can’t,” Quentin said, “but that’s actually not the same thing as having faith.”“Why do you always try to ruin everything?”“I’m not ruining it. I just want to understand it.”“If you had faith you wouldn’t have to understand.

He wanted to stick his finger in it and see what happened. Some story, some quest, started here, and he wanted to go on it. It felt fresh and clean and unsafe, nothing like the heavy warm lard of palace life. The protective plastic wrap had been peeled off

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.