The Magician King (The Magicians, #2)

by Lev Grossman

It was strange to be in a palace and not be king of it.

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.

The Deeper Magic always seemed to come up when Ember didn’t feel like doing something, or needed to close a plot hole. “I do not think you understand, my child. There are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”