The Magician King (The Magicians, #2)

by Lev Grossman

In all honesty Quentin had only a very vague idea of how tournaments worked, or even what they were, except that they were something kings used to do at some point between when Jesus was alive and when Shakespeare was alive, which was as close as Quentin could get to placing when the Middle Ages had actually happened.

“Of course I’m not sure,” he said. “That’s why you go. To find out if it’s enough. You just have to be sure you want to find out.”

“What do you call this style?” Quentin asked. “The mistake people make,” Bingle said, “is thinking that there are different styles.” “All right.” “Force, balance, leverage, momentum—these principles never change. They are your style.”

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.

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

“You wish to be a hero, but you do not know what a hero is. You think a hero is one who wins. But a hero must be prepared to lose, Quentin. Are you? Are you prepared to lose everything?”

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.

The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn’t love?

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.