The Magician King (The Magicians, #2)

by Lev Grossman

“If you please, Admiral, don’t be a cock.

He would endeavor to be as little of a cock as possible.

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.

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.

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

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.”

“I don’t think they can change their minds. When you get to that level of power and knowledge and perfection, the question of what you should do next gets increasingly obvious. Everything is very rule-governed. All you can ever do in any given situation is the most gloriously perfect thing, and there’s only one of them. Finally there aren’t any choices left to make at all.” “You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.”

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

And the hero gets the reward!” “No, Quentin,” the ram said. “The hero pays the price.”