Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lev Grossman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: June 26
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Lexington
Massachusetts
World
Realize
Realizing
Looking
Wired
Start
Brighter
Interesting
Meaningful
Actually
Obviously
Around
Expectations
Real
Expect

More quotes by Lev Grossman

Image
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
Image
There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.
Lev Grossman
Image
Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
Lev Grossman
Image
The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?
Lev Grossman
Image
Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.
Lev Grossman
Image
I'm not one of your knockabout, knuckle-scarred, Internet-controversy-courting book critics. Occasionally I stumble into controversy accidentally, but not because I enjoy it. It's probably just because I'm a weird person.
Lev Grossman
Image
Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.
Lev Grossman
Image
It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.
Lev Grossman
Image
Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
Lev Grossman
Image
It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
Lev Grossman
Image
He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
Lev Grossman
Image
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.
Lev Grossman
Image
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
Image
There is really no end to life's little humiliations.
Lev Grossman
Image
I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.
Lev Grossman
Image
I'm happy to report that 'The New Press' is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern.
Lev Grossman
Image
I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.
Lev Grossman
Image
You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
Lev Grossman
Image
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.
Lev Grossman
Image
A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the world is and what he would make of it.
Lev Grossman