The Magician King (The Magicians, #2)

by Lev Grossman

“Careful what you hunt,” Julia said, “lest you catch it.”

The Seeing Hare was one of the Unique Beasts of Fillory. There were a dozen of them—the Questing Beast, who had once granted Quentin three wishes, was one of them, as was the Great Bird of Peace, an ungainly flightless bird like a cassowary that could stop a battle by appearing between the two opposing armies. There was only one of each of them, hence the name, and each one had a special gift. The Unseen Monitor was a large lizard who could turn you invisible for a year, if that’s what you wanted.

But this wasn’t a Fillory novel. This was Fillory. So it was up to him.

He felt like he was coming back to life too. Not that he’d been dead, just . . . not quite alive. Something else.

“That’s why you go. To find out if it’s enough. You just have to be sure you want to find out.”

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.

Julia had been very very good for a very long time, and the funny thing about that was, if you’re too good too much of the time, people start to forget about you.

You’d best settle in, my friend, because Julia is playing the long game.

Because where could he have gone, what door could he have opened, what treasure could he have unlocked that would have been worth more to him than the golden key his daughter gave him?

The beginning, the laying down of the fundamentals, was always the worst part, which he supposed was why so few people did it.

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.

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

Julia would do anything to make the time pass. She killed time, murdered it, massacred it and hid the bodies.

had been sleeping her whole life, and now somehow, by doing this, she had poked it, and it stirred.

Here’s the one thing I got wrong, she thought. I thought that they could never wear me down.

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

The old gods were returning. Something about being a hero. All definitely important. Of paramount importance.

But, Quentin thought, you probably never will.

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.

“Did you bring me back anything?” “A bed. Josh. An Australian girl named Poppy. I didn’t have a lot of time. And you know how hard you are to shop for.”

Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

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

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. There’s your proof, Mr. Hofstadter: I am a strange loop.

The black dog was hunting. Julia was feeling it again, the blackness.

He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”

“Fillory doesn’t ask for much, does it?” “Fillory asks for everything.”

“Like me. You just don’t know it yet.”

How do you llike them apples.

LOL

“Mmmm.” Poppy salted her fish within an inch of its life, then drenched it in lemon juice. No amount of flavor seemed to be too much for her.

“After a while you get to be able to read the squares, like a language. Each one is an expression of the world it leads to, if you understand the grammar of it. No two are the same.

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.

The thing was to go to confession before you set out. You had to face yourself and deal with your shit, that’s how you got somewhere.

There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.

She would never be in love with Pouncy, but she felt love for him.

“I hope she does, Pouncy,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I truly hope she does. But we’ll miss you if you go.”

She wanted to throw down her candle and run around the room shouting at them, breaking up the flow, telling them it was okay, they didn’t have to do this, they had all they needed right there all around them if they could only see it.

This is life, he kept saying to himself. That was being dead, and this is being alive. That was death, this is life. I will never confuse them again.

“Do you know, I had almost lost faith in the goddess? I almost stopped believing in Her. But I realized I had to become something. I had to take what was done to me and use it to make myself into what I wanted to be. And I wanted this. And when I called Her, the goddess came.

The Julia sitting next to him on his bed was like a magnificent memorial to the girl she used to be.

“Thank you, old girl,” he said, just in case it, or she, could hear him. He patted the worn railing. “You’ve saved us one more time.”

That was the end of Quentin the Magician King, just like that. He was somebody else now. It was a silly thing to be sad about, really.