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.
LEV GROSSMANI 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.
More Lev Grossman Quotes
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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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Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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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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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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It’s an engrossing look at the way the flow of information shapes history-as well as a rare glimpse into the soul of the hardcore geek
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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.
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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
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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 problem with growing up is that once you’re grown up, the people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.
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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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People – me included – want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
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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 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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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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The truth doesn’t always make a good story, does it?
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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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I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.
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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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Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it’s much too late.
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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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Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.
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The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.
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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.
LEV GROSSMAN