The real world is horrible.
LEV GROSSMANYou’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!
More Lev Grossman Quotes
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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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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.
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In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.
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A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I’ve just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
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I think for a long time, I was paralyzed by some of my hopes and ideals for what my life was going to be like. I had this perfect vision of how my life should go, but it seemed – it was – impossible to realize, so I sat around for a long, long time doing almost nothing at all.
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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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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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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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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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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.
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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.
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The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.
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We have lived too long. The great days are past.
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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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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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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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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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His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he’d gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.
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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.
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It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
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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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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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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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People – me included – want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
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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.
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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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