The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)

by Lev Grossman

I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn’t think what else to do.

All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.

The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.

It was when he looked around to make absolutely sure that nobody was watching that he saw the dead body on the floor.

Quentin wished she weren’t so attractive. Unpretty women were so much easier to deal with in some ways—you didn’t have to face the pain of their probable unattainability. But she was not unpretty. She was pale and thin and unreasonably lovely, with a broad, ridiculously sexy mouth.

ok the first girl we’re introduced to was a failed crush, the next a sexualised emt ??

Unlike practically everybody, she seemed more interested in him than in James. “Listen, I think this guy might have left something for you.”

The weight of them was dragging him back down the gravity well of the ordinary world.

The Magicians Book Six of Fillory and Further

“I’m Eliot. Don’t tell me anything else, I don’t want to know. Don’t want to get attached.”

He held out his hands, palm up. The coin was . . . but there was no coin. It was gone. He turned his hands over, waggled his fingers, looked on the table, in his lap, on the floor. Nothing. It had disappeared. Did she nick it while he wasn’t looking? With those fast hands and that Mona Lisa smile, he couldn’t quite put it past her. “It is what I thought,” she said, standing up. “Thank you, Quentin, I will send in the next examiner.”

For the first time in his life he couldn’t tell if he’d passed or failed.

He spoke this language fluently, with no accent, like a native.

The words he spoke were not a prayer, exactly. More of an incantation.

They formed a house of cards.

The Queen of Horns, the Queen of Clocks, the Queen of Bees, the Queen of Books.

Watch this: Quentin squared the deck again and with no particular effort ripped it in half and then ripped the halves in half and tossed the resulting confetti at the assembled company, who all flinched except for Fogg.

it was the hilt of a bright, burning sword that he drew easily out of the tabletop, as if it had been left there buried up to the hilt.

“To answer your questions of last night, you are at the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy.”

You would be losing one world but gaining another. Brakebills would become your world. It’s not a decision to be taken lightly.”

He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping an uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters.

or maybe Eliot had decided that the tedium of solitude was ever so slightly greater than the tedium of Quentin’s company.

You’ll be dealing with your equals for the first time in your life, and your betters. You won’t like it.

“Russell once gave a public lecture on the structure of the universe. Afterward he was approached by a woman who told him that he was a very clever young man but much mistaken in his thinking, because everyone knew that the world was flat and sat on the back of a turtle. “When Russell asked her what the turtle was standing on, she replied, ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever. But it’s turtles all the way down!’

AHHHH SO HAPPY I READ TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN TO LEARN THIS REFRENCE

The same way a verb has to agree with its subject, it turned out, even the simplest spell had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstances of its casting, and a hundred other factors, all of which were tabulated in volumes of tables and charts and diagrams printed in microscopic jewel type on huge yellowing elephant-folio pages.

If a spell was going to work, then on some gut level you had to mean it.

Once magic was real everything else just seemed so unreal.

Nothing stays buried forever.

“Hush,” she said. “It wasn’t time yet. You’ll find it again, if you look hard enough. That much I can promise you.”

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.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

The branch came from nowhere. It was attached to nothing. It just hung there in front of the man’s face.

“What we saw would have been a small part of it, an extremity it chose to push into our sphere of being, like a toddler groping around in a tide pool. Such phenomena have been observed before. They are known in the literature as Excrescences.

He didn’t know yet that Amanda Orloff was dead. The Beast had eaten her alive.

just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn’t, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn’t.

“It’s okay,” she said, with a quick little smile that strained the ligaments that held Quentin’s heart in his chest. “I didn’t think so. I was more wondering whether you would lie about it.”

The worlds of magical and physical reality felt equally real and present to him.

The implications of this were stunning: magic wasn’t simply random, it had an actual shape—a fractal, chaotic shape, but subconsciously his blindly groping mental fingertips had begun to parse it.

“But if you listen to me only one more time in your lives, listen to me now. Once you reach a certain level of fluency as a spellcaster, you will begin to manipulate reality freely. Not all of you—Dale, I think you in particular are unlikely to cross that Rubicon. But for some of you spells will one day come very easily, almost automatically, with very little in the way of conscious effort.

“She was a good student. She kept busy and got by in her boring little way until her Third Year, when she finally distinguished herself by falling in love with one of her professors. “Everybody does it, of course. Or at least the girls do, since we all have daddy complexes.

???

“The problem with growing up,” Quentin said, “is that once you’re grown up, people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.”

“Welcome to the house that time forgot to forget,”

I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.

“Is . . . is this optional? I mean, is anybody else besides me disturbed by the idea of having an angry demon, you know, trapped inside their skin?” “If that bothers you, Georgia,” Fogg said curtly, “then you should have gone to beauty school. Don’t worry, he’ll be grateful as hell, so to speak, when you set him free. He’s only good for one fight though, so pick your moment.

The bunnies call this place the Neitherlands—because it’s neither here nor there—or sometimes just the City.

“The thing is, the more I study it, the more I think it’s exactly the opposite—that our world has much less substance than the City, and what we experience as reality is really just a footnote to what goes on there. An epiphenomenon.

“Or you know what it is? You hate yourself so much, you’ll hurt anybody who loves you. That’s it, isn’t it? Just to get even with them for loving you. I never saw that before now.”

Now the present had a purpose, and the future had a purpose, and even the past, their whole lives, retroactively, had meaning. Now they knew what it was for.

The little girl’s hooded eyes expressed a precocious acquaintance with adversity.