More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first.
brother !
what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.
This Is false - books work exactly this way. You always have to go back to where you were but meantime every book is a holiday , adventure , brave new world
He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world—he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly, humiliatingly, just to get one sip of air.
The room filled with a collective rustling of paper, like a flock of birds taking off. Heads bowed in unison. Quentin recognized this motion. It was the motion of a bunch of high-powered type-A test killers getting down to their bloody work. That was all right. He was one of them.
“Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink,” he said. “Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn’t drink.”
That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog. To tell you the truth I’m kind of glad he hit you.”
Sometimes they plonked down and rested and fed in a reservoir or a highway median or a badly drained spot on the lawn of a suburban office park (landscaping errors were pure gold to geese).
What are the five Tertiary Circumstances?” It popped out automatically. “Altitude, Age, Position of the Pleiades, Phase of the Moon, Nearest Body of Water.”
I don't think about the Pleiades that much, though I do look for them whenever the sky is dark enough.
The rest of these are my location in the world, constantly aware of them.
magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules.
“Wake up!” Alice said. “This isn’t a story! It’s just one fucking thing after another! Somebody could have died back there!”
he was dressed all in black and wore a long cape, apparently as an expression of the extreme seriousness with which he regarded himself and his abilities.
Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.” “You can’t just decide to be happy.” “No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable.
In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster.
