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 choose which way you went.
Everything will be all right, She seemed to say, and whatever is not, we will mourn.
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.
Up through around twenty-five he’d never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand.
Probably falling in love is always a little like that: You discover that one other person who understands what no one else seems to, which is that the world is broken and can never, ever be fixed. You can stop pretending, at least for a little while. You can both admit it, if only to each other.
And why not do the easiest possible thing? Because isn’t that always the best thing?
This isn’t how it ends!” Quentin said. “I am the hero of this goddamned story, Ember! Remember? And the hero gets the reward!” “No, Quentin,” the ram said. “The hero pays the price.
Her white fox fur was coarse and smooth at the same time, and she made little yipping snarls every time he pushed himself deeper inside her. He never wanted to stop.
Plum guessed it stood to reason that out of all these billions of books at least one of them had to be dragon porn.
Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.
She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.
The memories were safe, sealed forever in amber.
Guy lives in a fantasy world without junk food or cars or trans fats or TV and he’s still fat. You had to admire his dedication to the cause.
Do you know, I had almost lost faith in the goddess? I almost stopped believing in Her. But I realized I had to become something. I had to take what was done to me and use it to make myself into what I wanted to be. And I wanted this. And when I called Her, the goddess came.
But you know how there’s a certain kind of person – and it’s different for everyone – but suddenly when you see them your eye just snags on them, you get caught and you can’t look away, and you’re ten times more awake than you were a moment ago, and it’s like you’re a harp string and somebody just plucked you?
For a long time Eliot had had the theory that in Janet’s mind everybody was as judgmental of her as she was of them, and if that was true then the world must be a pretty scary place for her.
That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny.
There are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn’t seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time – the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They’d have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves.
Free Trader Beowulf – you had to be at least forty and a recovering pen-and-paper role-playing-gamer to get the reference, but it was apt. Google it.