The Magician King Quotes

“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.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“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.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“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.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here!”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“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.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.”

“In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.”

“The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Sometimes you just have to do things, Quentin,” Julia said, as he climbed on board after her. “You spend too much of your time waiting.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“She had never expected anything special to just happen to her. Her plan for life was to get out there and make special things happen, which was a much more sensible plan from a probability point of view.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was in love with Julia or just that he wanted to be in love with her, because it would be so comforting, such a relief, to be in love with her. It seemed like such a good idea. Was there really that big of a difference?”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“She knew she was obsessed, but it was turning out that she was the kind of person who needed to be obsessed with something, and she could have done a lot worse.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was trying to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders…”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“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”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“In one huge leather-gloved fist Jollyby held up a large, madly kicking hare by its ears.

'Son of a bitch,' Dauntless said. 'He caught it.'

Dauntless was a talking horse. She just didn't talk much.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Julia would do anything to make the time pass. She killed time, murdered it, massacred it and hid the bodies. She threw her days in bunches onto the bonfire with both hands and watched them go up in fragrant smoke. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes it felt like the hours had ground to a halt. They fought her as they passed, one after the other, like stubborn stools.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“If you please, Admiral, don't be a cock. I'll know it when I see it, and if, for some reason, I don't, you tell me, alright?" Admiral Lacker inclined his head almost imperceptibly to indicate that they had a deal. He would endeavor to be as little of a cock as possible.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“When she looked back the whole thing had a queer, unreal feeling to it, but then again you often get a queer, unreal feeling when you stay up till four and get up at seven.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“He was aware for the first time of how quiet the city had gotten. After dark the streets and canals seemed to empty out. As if Venice felt less of an obligation to pretend to be part of this millennium at night, and had reverted to its medieval self again.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Like wine, Provençal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. It concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“A key part of successfully being Julia, it seemed, was not giving a shit if you looked weird.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King