The Magician King (The Magicians, #2)

by Lev Grossman

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everything will be all right, She seemed to say, and whatever is not, we will mourn.

Better never to have lived, when the old gods return.”

He felt like a frozen tundra where nothing grew and nothing would ever grow again.