Roxane > Roxane's Quotes

“It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“Though 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.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.”
― Lev Grossman

“Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“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. ”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“...In books there's always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world's in danger, evil's on the rise, but if you're really quick and take this ring and put it in that volcano over there everything will be fine.

"But in real life that guy never turns up. He's never there. He's busy handing out advice in the next universe over. In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't. There's no answers in the back of the book.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“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.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.”
― Lev Grossman

“Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“Now he had answers, but they weren't doing what answers were supposed to do: they weren't making things simpler or easier. They weren't helping.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“It was funny how just when you thought you knew yourself through and through, you stumbled on a new kind of strength, a fresh reserve of power inside you that you never knew you had, and all at once you found yourself burning a little brighter and hotter than you ever had before.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone’s just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you’ve figured it out and done it, you’ll never know whether you were right or wrong. You’ll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn’t.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“He wasn't in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren't their fault.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“Sometimes you just have to do things, Quentin,” Julia said, as he climbed on board after her. “You spend too much of your time waiting.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“we among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“There are any number of reasons to want novels to survive. The way [Jonathan] Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can't. He cites -- as one does -- the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions. With the help of cell phones, e-mail and handheld games, it's easier to stay busy, in the Kierkegaardian sense, than it's ever been.

Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. "We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful," Franzen says. "The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.”
― Lev Grossman

“When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slip through into Fillory...it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”
― Philip Pullman

“I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.”
― Philip Pullman