The Magicians Trilogy Boxed Set Quotes

“Chop chop. I'm literally losing the will to live." —Eliot”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy Boxed Set: The Magicians; The Magician King; The Magician's Land

“The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea. Solidly rooted in the traditions of both fantasy and mainstream literary fiction, the novel tips its hat to Oz and Narnia as well as to Harry, but don’t mistake this for a children’s book. Grossman’s sensibilities are thoroughly adult, his narrative dark and dangerous and full of twists. Hogwarts was never like this.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“For a long time Eliot had had the theory that in Janet’s mind everybody was as judgmental of her as she was of them, and if that was true then the world must be a pretty scary place for her. No wonder she liked it out there by herself.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“Plum got up at eight the next morning, late by her standards, but instead of rejuvenating her brain the extra sleep had just made it all muzzy. It had smeared all those clear thoughts she was supposed to be having all over the inside of her skull. Her depressive tendency, the flip side of her manic streak, was stirring. Why were they even doing this? it wanted to know. What a waste of time, of effort. Of pencils. Plum needed to get moving, but she was having trouble attaching meanings to things; the meanings kept peeling off like old stickers.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“She’d broken her staff and drowned her book and sworn off magic forever.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“She was especially confident when it came to pointing out other people’s mistakes. Not that she was a know-it-all—it didn’t seem to be an ego thing with her. She just assumed that everybody shared her desire for everybody to be clear on everything, and she’d expect you to do the same for her.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“He was sarcastic and spookily smart and, on some level, basically a kind person who just needed a ton of therapy and maybe some mood-altering drugs. Something to selectively inhibit the voracious reuptake of serotonin that was obviously going on inside his skull 24-7.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“by which I mean he ran his ship into it.” Quentin wondered if there was a joke to be made about “founder” and “founder.” If there was it had probably already made the rounds of the Outer Island.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“You never got a particularly nautically rigorous look at the Swift, but you nonetheless came away with a powerful impression of it: it was a plucky but cozy little vessel, elegant to look at but game in a fight, with sleek lines and glowing yellow portholes through which one glimpsed snug, shipshape cabins.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“But you could tell she was bursting with some terrible secret. And she had those things that one likes about magicians: she was disgustingly bright and rather sad and slightly askew. To tell you the truth I think one of the things we liked about her was that she reminded us of you.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“You know her parents are lawyers? Entertainment lawyers. Fantastically rich, huge house in Brentwood, working all the time, no discernible emotional life whatsoever.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“He liked one tapestry in particular that depicted a marvelously appointed griffin frozen in the act of putting a company of foot soldiers to flight. It was supposed to symbolize the triumph of some group of long-dead people over some other group of long-dead people whom nobody had liked, but for some reason the griffin had cocked its head to one side in the midst of its rampage and was gazing directly out of its woven universe at the viewer as if to say, yes, granted, I’m good at this. But is it really the best use of my time?”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“We should to do it,” he said. “Today of all days.” “We’re accepting congratulations for doing nothing.” “We’re reassuring the people of continuity in the face of tragedy.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“We shall now seek that which we shall not find. —Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“His heart felt like it was burning with relief and regret, the emotions melting and running together and turning into bright, hot, white light. “The thing is,” he said. “I’d hate to cut out right before bonus season.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“His molten anger and grief were cooling into a glossy protective coating, a hard transparent lacquer of uncaring. If he couldn’t go back, he would just have to do things differently going forward. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“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 Trilogy

“It was still possible that five years from now, when they were more or less over their post-traumatic stress disorder, they’d all get a big kick out of getting together and talking about it.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“You can’t just decide to be happy.” “No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“At that moment, when he should have been most lucidly present, he had no idea whether he was lying or telling the truth.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“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. To”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“She ruminated, again, on the eternal return, the widening gyre, that seemed to govern human history. There is a tide in the affairs of men. A slack tide, that heaves up wrack and slime and rotting seaweed and deposits them on the sand, like a cat leaving the corpse of a rat on your doorstep. Then it slinks back in search of more.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“When he was younger it seemed like the only time he wasn’t afraid was when he was angry. He’d been so full of fear and self-doubt that the only way he could think of to be strong was to attack the world around him.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy Boxed Set: The Magicians; The Magician King; The Magician's Land

“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 Magicians Trilogy

“And now we are going to put our Jimmy Choo so far up your ass, your going to taste next season.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy Boxed Set: The Magicians; The Magician King; The Magician's Land

“What is the point of magic if we can't use it to fix real problems?”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“What is the point of magic if we can't fix real problems?”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy

“The room had the seedy, humiliated look of a bar seen in direct sunlight, sticky and thoroughly initialed by knife- and claw-wielding patrons. The floor was paved with old round millstones lightly covered with a scattering of straw, the chinks between them filled in with packed dirt. Neither”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy