The collection / 72 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1969 AD

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 / quote

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02c. 1969 AD

Sometimes he looked at her and thought, Gosh, I wonder what's underneath all that anger, all that hard glossy armor? Maybe there's just an innocent, wounded little girl in there who wants to come out and play and be loved and get happy. But now he wondered if maybe that little girl was long gone, or if she'd ever been there at all. What was under all that armor, all that anger? More anger, and more armor. Anger and armor, all the way down.

Lev Grossman / quote

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03c. 1969 AD

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

Lev Grossman / quote

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04c. 1969 AD

You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.

Lev Grossman / quote

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05c. 1969 AD

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.

Lev Grossman / quote

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06c. 1969 AD

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

Lev Grossman / quote

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07c. 1969 AD

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, or tainted somehow. I'm the first kind. To use a painfully precious metaphor, I need fixed stars to navigate by, otherwise I get lost in the blankness of the page.

Lev Grossman / quote

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08c. 1969 AD

Living in a castle is objectively romantic.

Lev Grossman / quote

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09c. 1969 AD

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 the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many people ever experience. That's where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.

Lev Grossman / quote

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10c. 1969 AD

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 a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.

Lev Grossman / quote

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11c. 1969 AD

...being around him wasn’t good for Quentin. He could feel himself regressing in the direction of an adolescent tantrum—it was like trying to talk to his parents. He lost all perspective on who he was and how far he’d come.

Lev Grossman / quote

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12c. 1969 AD

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

Lev Grossman / quote

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13c. 1969 AD

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 are too big. I know I'm being mean. But you know, they're just sort of at the edge of everything.

Lev Grossman / quote

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14c. 1969 AD

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.

Lev Grossman / quote

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15c. 1969 AD

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 / quote

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16c. 1969 AD

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

Lev Grossman / quote

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17c. 1969 AD

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.

Lev Grossman / quote

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18c. 1969 AD

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 begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.

Lev Grossman / quote

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19c. 1969 AD

Whether or not he was in it, whether or not he could see or touch it, he'd thought there would always be a FIllory out there somewhere. He loved knowing it was there. It anchored his sense of happiness, the way a distant stockpile of gold might underwrite the value of a paper bill.

Lev Grossman / quote

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20c. 1969 AD

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 / quote

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21c. 1969 AD

Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex.

Lev Grossman / quote

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22c. 1969 AD

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

Lev Grossman / quote

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23c. 1969 AD

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

Lev Grossman / quote

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24c. 1969 AD

I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books.

Lev Grossman / quote

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