89+ Lev Grossman Quotes On Magic, Order And Magical

Lev Grossman is an American novelist best known for his Magicians trilogy. He is also the book critic for Time magazine and has written several other novels, including Codex and The Magician King. Grossman's works often explore fantasy and science fiction themes, as well as the effects of technology on modern life. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Lev Grossman on love, life, leadership.

Top 10 Lev Grossman Quotes

1. 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
2. If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.
3. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
4. I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.
5. 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.
6. A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the world is and what he would make of it.
7. 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.
8. It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.
9. 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.
10. 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.

Lev Grossman Short Quotes

• I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
• It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
• Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.
• You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
• We have lived too long. The great days are past.
• The real world is horrible.
• People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
• It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
• As a writer I'm more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.
• The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

Lev Grossman Quotes About Life

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. — Lev Grossman

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. — Lev Grossman

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 Grossman

It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits. — Lev Grossman

There is really no end to life's little humiliations. — Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman Quotes About Magic

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. — Lev Grossman

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

Most people are blind to magic. They move thru 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

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change. — Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman Famous Quotes And Sayings

For 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 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. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was trying to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders. — Lev Grossman

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

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. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

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

Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?" "Oh, absolutely," Quentin said. "Maybe even more. — Lev Grossman

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! — Lev Grossman

I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century. — Lev Grossman

I love playing with the conventions of fantasy, and breaking rules, and crossing lines. — Lev Grossman

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism. — Lev Grossman

You don't want to move toward some utopian literary situation where everybody's free of all conventions. That's ridiculous! Conventions are what you need. You have nothing to break down if you don't have conventions. — Lev Grossman

You're saying the gods don't have free will." "The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals — Lev Grossman

More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way. — Lev Grossman

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.' — Lev Grossman

It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen. — Lev Grossman

I always hated those fantasy books where, at the end, all the kids had to go home. At the end of a Narnia book, you always got shown the door. Same with The Wizard Of Oz and The Phantom Tollbooth. You get kicked out of your magic land. It's like, "By the way, here's your next surprise: You get to go home!" And the kids are all like, "Yay, we get to go home!" I never bought that. Did anybody buy that? — Lev Grossman

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone. — Lev Grossman

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? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. — Lev Grossman

When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slip through into Fillory...it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for. — Lev Grossman

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell... I defy anybody to read the first page and not keep going to the last. — Lev Grossman

When I was 35 I realized that I was still thinking a lot about what it would be like to go to Narnia. To really go - not just in a daydream, or in a children's book, but what it would actually feel like, physically, psychologically, every other way. The idea was haunting me. — Lev Grossman

His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling. — Lev Grossman

Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse. — Lev Grossman

I'm a fantasy writer. I don't do SF. This is important to me. If you're not clear on what genre you're in, everything gets muddled, and it's hard to know which rules you're breaking. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell. — Lev Grossman

I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game. — Lev Grossman

We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up. — Lev Grossman

It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there. — Lev Grossman

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't. — Lev Grossman

I don't know if I've ever derived such an immediate sense of calm and well-being from any book as I did from 'Right Ho, Jeeves.' It was like I was Pac-Man and the book was a power-up. — Lev Grossman

Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window? — Lev Grossman

Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do. — Lev Grossman

My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation. — Lev Grossman

Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all. — Lev Grossman

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it? — Lev Grossman

One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country. — Lev Grossman

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 was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it. — Lev Grossman

Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you. — Lev Grossman

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

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. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began. — Lev Grossman

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost. — Lev Grossman

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. — Lev Grossman

The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore. — Lev Grossman

Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should. — Lev Grossman

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

Life Lessons by Lev Grossman

1. Lev Grossman's work emphasizes the importance of examining the complexities of life and relationships, and the need to take risks and embrace change.
2. His novels explore themes of identity, self-discovery, and the power of imagination, providing readers with an opportunity to reflect on their own lives.
3. Grossman's stories provide valuable lessons on the importance of embracing our own unique perspectives, and the power of storytelling to connect us to one another.