Escapism has value, even if I don’t know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it’s just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.
LEV GROSSMANHe wasn’t surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you’ve done all the work to get something you don’t even want it anymore.
More Lev Grossman Quotes
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I feel that’s one of the central questions of fantasy. What did we lose when we entered the 20th and 21st century, and how can we mourn what we lost, and what can we replace it with? We’re still asking those questions in an urgent way.
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A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the world is and what he would make of it.
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We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.
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His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
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Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it’s much too late.
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I’ve only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read ‘The Long Walk,’ one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read ‘The Dark Half,’ which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read ’11/22/63.’
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Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.
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Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
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The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.
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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.
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I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.
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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!
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The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.
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I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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I love playing with the conventions of fantasy, and breaking rules, and crossing lines.
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I recognize that on paper, you can’t really tell that I’m a fan or a nerd.
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People – me included – want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
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Supposedly I’ve got traces of an English accent, though I can’t hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who’s English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.
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He wasn’t surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you’ve done all the work to get something you don’t even want it anymore.
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You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals
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I loved fantasy, but I particularly loved the stories in which somebody got out of where they were and into somewhere better – as in the Chronicles Of Narnia, The Wizard Of Oz, The Phantom Tollbooth, the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon.
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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.
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Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
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Maybe there’s a sense that technology isn’t necessarily the answer to a lot of our problems. Fantasy offers readers a less radically alienated world – a world where desires and feelings that normally are trapped inside your mind are made real in the form of magic.
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Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?” “Oh, absolutely,” Quentin said. “Maybe even more.
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A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.” “In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.
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