The Magician King (The Magicians, #2)

by Lev Grossman

It was fun being a problem. 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.

If he could fall back in love with Julia, it would be like time winding itself back, and he could start over again. 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.

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.

He wanted a quest? Now he had one. The quest was to get back to where he was when he started his goddamned quest.

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.

“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.

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

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.

He wanted his life to be exciting and important and to mean something.

“We can’t all be heroes. Then who would the heroes fight? It’s a matter of numbers really. Just work out the sums.”