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 GROSSMANYou’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals
More Lev Grossman Quotes
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It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
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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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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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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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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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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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We have lived too long. The great days are past.
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The truth doesn’t always make a good story, does it?
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The real world is horrible.
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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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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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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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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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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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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 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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His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
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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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I recognize that on paper, you can’t really tell that I’m a fan or a nerd.
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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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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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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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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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The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.
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People – me included – want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
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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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