The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn’t love?
This whole world was a processed petroleum product.
Something must be going on deep in his subconscious, he thought, some kind of redecoration, refurbishment, reupholstering that required a lot of downtime – some shadowy application running in the background, performing unknown operations, consuming huge chunks of psychic ram.
With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.
It’s true,” Eliot said. “Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don’t spoil it.
I never went back to my room. I took the Fung Wah bus from South Station.
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.
June ripened into July, then burst and withered and dried and became August.
It wasn’t time yet. You’ll find it again, if you look hard enough.
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 of air.
You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it’s much too late.
It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.
As a writer I’m more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.
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.
Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.
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!
I love playing with the conventions of fantasy, and breaking rules, and crossing lines.
The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.