Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Lev Grossman
148 quotes
“You know what women are like? They’re like those long, skinny blocks you get in Tetris, the ones made out of four blocks straight in a row. First when you need them you can’t get any, then when you don’t need them anymore they’re fucking everywhere and you don’t know what to do with them.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe he was lying,” Peters said. “Lie is a blow to the tyranny of fact,” Hollis said…. “I think lies are good,” he said. “People should lie more. Lies are like these little peepholes into a better world.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there’s a bright side to the galaxy,” Peter said, more or less aimlessly, “we’re on the planet that’s farthest from it.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A Man, a Plan, a Bacchanal: Anomie,” said Peters, grandly.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was just getting comfortable,” she said. “Gimme another sec.” “You can have all the sex you want.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I just thought of this—it’s the American university system. This is my new theory: the New Feudalism. You go to college and you get used to living like some kind of medieval overlord, with people waiting on you and everything, and it warps your mind. It happens to everybody. By the time you graduate you have all the personal habits of an aristocrat, and none of the money. No wonder you’re dysfunctional—you’re a twentieth-century office temp who’s channeling a nobleman in the British Raj.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes I think you have an overly vivid imagination, Hollis. With some things it’s just not worth thinking about them too carefully before they happen. They almost never turn out to be as horrible as you think they will.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who would’ve thought doing nothing all the time would turn out to be so damn tiring?”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn’t happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn’t think what else to do.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn’t be it. It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he’d been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“…it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But now that the ripened fruit of all that preparation was right in front of him he suddenly lost any desire for it. 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. He had it all the time. It was one of the few things he could depend on.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well,” she announced cheerfully, “he’s dead!”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Quentin wished she weren’t so attractive. Unpretty women were so much easier to deal with in someways—you didn’t have to face the pain of their probable unattainability.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Dean will probably be down to get you in another minute,” Eliot said. “Here’s my advice. Sit there…and try to look like you belong here. And if you tell him you saw me smoking, I will banish you to the lowest circle of hell. Which I’ve never been there, but if even half of what I hear is true it’s almost as bad as Brooklyn.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world—he’d spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Quinton didn’t know exactly how to put everything that was ridiculous about that idea in a single sentence.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping and uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters. It wasn’t something he had much practice at.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Quentin had never met anybody so staggeringly and unapologetically affected.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Are you smart?” There was no non-embarrassing answer to this. “I guess.” “Don’t worry about it, everybody here is. If they even brought you in for the Exam you were the smartest person in your school, teachers included. Everyone here was the cleverest little monkey in his or her particular tree. Except now we’re all in one tree together. It can be a shock. Not enough coconuts to go round. You’ll be dealing with your equals for the first time in your life, and your betters. You won’t like it.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once magic was real everything else just seemed so unreal.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You’re an interesting case,” she said. There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just then, for an instant, the film of reality slipped off the spokes of its projector. Everything went completely askew and then righted itself again as if nothing had happened.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Age,” Quentin heard him mutter. “It’s wasted on the young. Just like youth.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had no interest in TV anymore—it looked like an electronic puppet show to him, an artificial version of an imitation world that meant nothing to him anyway.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Quentin’s conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This was real, human sex, and it was so much better just because they weren’t animals—because they were civilized and prudish and self-conscious humans who transformed into sweaty, lustful, naked beasts, not through magic but because that’s who on some level they really were all along.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even Quentin knew that using magic to alter one’s physical appearance never ended well. In the world of magical theory it was a dead spot: something about the inextricable, recursive connection between your face and who you were—your soul, for lack of a better word—made it hellishly difficult and fatally unpredictable.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’s so happy,” Eliot said dryly. “It’s like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem with growing up,” Quentin said, “is that once you’re grown up, people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody has their own idiopathic reaction to their childhood home.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“New York’s magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sure, but real life’s not actually like that,” Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. “You don’t just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You’re not going to be a character in a story, there’s nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn’t work like that.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had reached the outer limits of what Fun, capital F, could do for him. The cost was way too high, the returns pitifully inadequate. His mind was dimly awakening, too late, to other things that were as important, or even more so.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They were crossing so many lines it was hard to figure out where they were anymore.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some tiny sane part of him knew he was out of control, but that wasn’t the part of him that had its hands on the wheel.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyway, the mood he was in, Quentin was willing to take any position on any subject with anybody if it meant he could pick a fight.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.” “You can’t just decide to be happy.” “No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The power to create order is one thing. The power to destroy is another. Always they are in balance. But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a funny thing about the old gods,” he said. “You think that just because they’re old they must be difficult to kill. But when the fighting starts, they go down just like anybody else. They aren’t stronger, they’re just older.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it’ll only turn you into a monster.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If he couldn’t go back, he would just have to do things differently going forward. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything. The funny thing about it was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be honest, Quentin felt superior to anybody who still messed around with magic. They could delude themselves if they liked, those self-indulgent magical mandarins, but he’d outgrown that stuff. He wasn’t a magician anymore, he was a man, and a man took responsibility for his actions.”
Lev Grossman (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source