Blue screen of death: she’d crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.

Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn’t drink.

[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is...

Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it.

I have a little theory that I’d like to air here, if I may. What is it that you think makes you magicians?” More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical-question territory now anyway. He spoke...

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.

his mind spinning and lurching like a dryer with a shoe in it

Emily Greenstreet was one of these girls that nobody ever notices, who are only friends with other girls nobody notices. Nobody likes or dislikes them. They have weak chins, or chicken-pox scars, or their glasses...

The truth doesn’t always make a good story, does it?

He was in the right place. He was living his best life. How many other people in the multiverse could say that?

A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was?...

This is a feeling that you had, Quentin, she said. Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of...

I’ve learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it’s not what I thought it was. It doesn’t make you special and sparkly. You don’t...

It’s time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though– and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger– he was angry only because his position was so weak.

…In books there’s always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world’s in danger, evil’s on the rise, but if you’re really quick and take this ring and put it in that volcano over...

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.

You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn’t, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn’t. Put it in perspective.

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn’t a major part of an author’s job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn’t invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer’s Odyssey...

Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first.

That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it...

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...

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

I read obsessively when I’m writing. I think there are two kinds of fiction writers, those who read incessantly while they write and those who can’t read at all, lest their individual voices get overwhelmed,...

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On...

I just completed a long car trip on a Sunday in August with two small children, which believe me is enough to convince you that Samuel Beckett was right about everything.

Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do. That was the hard part, accepting that you didn’t get to...

I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don’t need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.

Everything people forget about ends up there one day, they said. Toys, tables, whole houses. And people end up there too. They get forgotten as well.

Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but...

He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world — he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly, humiliatingly, just to get one sip...

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.

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he...

If my generation is remembered for anything, it will be as the last one that remembers the world before the Internet.

Like wine, Provençal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers...

I call the right axe Sorrow,” she said. “You know what I call the left one?” “Happiness?” “Sorrow. I can’t tell them apart.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect.

The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn’t love?

I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the...

Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.

We’re wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn’t, we start looking around for the real world.

And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no...

If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so.

Well, look, I was angry. I don’t think I commit a lot of gratuitous violence, but this was war, and he was a jerk, and I made a mess of him. I threw him through...

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

By the standards of magical society they’d fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn’t had the basic good sense to keep their shit to themselves.

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...

The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d...