Lev Grossman Quotes

Quotes about:

• For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. 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. 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.

  Lev Grossman

  Inspirational, Real, Character

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.264, Penguin

  47 Copy quote

• Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

  Lev Grossman

  Writing, Media, Literature

  17 Copy quote

• If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

  Lev Grossman

  Life Lesson, Wish, Lessons

  Lev Grossman (2009). “The Magicians: A Novel”, p.216, Penguin

  10 Copy quote

• He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

  Lev Grossman

  Doe, Quests

  Lev Grossman (2011). “The Magician King: A Novel”, p.251, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

  Lev Grossman

  People, About Yourself

  12 Copy quote

• Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

  Lev Grossman

  Writing, Advice, Writing Advice

  6 Copy quote

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

  Lev Grossman

  Quests, Wanted

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.478, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

  Lev Grossman

  Past, Play, Would Be

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.245, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Hurt, Strong, Pain

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.173, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Home, Matter

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.612, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Lev Grossman

  Expectations, World, Way

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.387, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

  Lev Grossman

  Process

  Lev Grossman (2009). “The Magicians: A Novel”, p.55, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Doors, Waiting

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.259, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.

  Lev Grossman

  Meaningful, Real, Interesting

  "Goodreads" interview, www.goodreads.com. August, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

• By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

  Lev Grossman

  Annoyed, Enough, Should

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.560, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the
  world is and what he would make of it.

  Lev Grossman

  Strong, Pain, World

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.173, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.

  Lev Grossman

  Bored, Age, Young

  4 Copy quote

• You're all so obsessed with other worlds, you're so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you've never bothered to figure out what's going on here!

  Lev Grossman

  Other Worlds, Contentment, Obsessed

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.456, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

  Lev Grossman

  Loss, Lost, Mourn

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.293, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.

  Lev Grossman

  Giving Up, Brave, Easy

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.298, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• The main advantage of being a reviewer is that you read a lot. A lot of books get sent to you, and you have an amazing vantage point from which to observe what's going on in contemporary fiction - not only genre stuff, the whole spectrum.

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Contemporary Fiction, Stuff

  "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

  6 Copy quote

• The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.

  Lev Grossman

  Majority, Forgotten, Ends

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Book, Order

  8 Copy quote

• Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was trying to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders.

  Lev Grossman

  Queens, Sailing, Trying

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.353, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• I'm now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, "There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres." I'm much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it's doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that.

  Lev Grossman

  Giving, Wonderful, Excited

  4 Copy quote

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