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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
Quests
Quest
Didn
Wanted

More quotes by 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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Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.
Lev Grossman
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Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.
Lev Grossman
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Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.
Lev Grossman
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In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.
Lev Grossman
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Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do? Oh, absolutely, Quentin said. Maybe even more.
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 wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.
Lev Grossman
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There is really no end to life's little humiliations.
Lev Grossman
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That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.
Lev Grossman
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It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.
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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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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It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though-- and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger-- he was angry only because his position was so weak.
Lev Grossman
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I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '
Lev Grossman
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I recognize that on paper, you can't really tell that I'm a fan or a nerd.
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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You don't want to move toward some utopian literary situation where everybody's free of all conventions. That's ridiculous! Conventions are what you need. You have nothing to break down if you don't have conventions.
Lev Grossman
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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
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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.
Lev Grossman