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I feel that's one of the central questions of fantasy. What did we lose when we entered the 20th and 21st century, and how can we mourn what we lost, and what can we replace it with? We're still asking those questions in an urgent way.

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
Feel
Questions
Feels
Asking
Way
Lose
Mourn
Loses
Entered
Century
Replace
Lost
Urgent
Stills
Central
Still
Fantasy

More quotes by Lev Grossman

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For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. 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. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.
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You're saying the gods don't have free will. The power to make mistakes, Penny said. Only we have that. Mortals
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Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
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Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.
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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.
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The real world is horrible.
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I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.
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Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
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Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.
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Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?
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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.
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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.
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There is really no end to life's little humiliations.
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Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.
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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.
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A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the world is and what he would make of it.
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You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
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