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Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it’s much too late.

Lev Grossman

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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Choices Mistakes Pennies
His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
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Jokes Personality Whole
Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.
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Magic Mind World
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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Believe Book Need Order Stories
We have lived too long. The great days are past.
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Day Great Long Past
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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Book Forgiving Habit
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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Book Dark Kings Pseudonymous
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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Cartoon Dragons Wizards
I recognize that on paper, you can’t really tell that I’m a fan or a nerd.
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Fans Nerd Paper Trouble
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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Feelings Real Technology
It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
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Easy Turnsm Something
Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?” “Oh, absolutely,” Quentin said. “Maybe even more.
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Hate Parent Promise
The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.
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Learning Nonstop Process Wonderment
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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Asking Fantasy Way
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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Long Perfect Thinking
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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Past Play Ruin Stay
I love playing with the conventions of fantasy, and breaking rules, and crossing lines.
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Breaking Crossing Line Lines Rules
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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Magical Pain Strong World
Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
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Careful Catch Hunts Lest
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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Healthy Way World
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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Contribute Different People Silicon Small Together
I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.
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East Tribe Way
Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.
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Advice Seriously Writing
He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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Complete Merely Quest Something
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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Interesting Numbers Observed Order
I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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Important Influence White
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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Anticlimactic Done Feelings Something Want

Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it’s much too late.

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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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Popular Authors

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