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

Lev Grossman

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Lev Grossman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: June 26
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Lexington
Massachusetts
Quest
Didn
Wanted
Quests

More quotes by Lev Grossman

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People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
Lev Grossman
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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
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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.
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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
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We have lived too long. The great days are past.
Lev Grossman
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It's a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you're supposed to like it.
Lev Grossman
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It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
Lev Grossman
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My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.
Lev Grossman
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Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
Lev Grossman
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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
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It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.
Lev Grossman
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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
Lev Grossman
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Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
Lev Grossman
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It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
Lev Grossman
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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
Lev Grossman
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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
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I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.
Lev Grossman
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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
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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
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Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.
Lev Grossman