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Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.

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
Realize
Dangerous
Realizing
Limitations
Stuff
Limitation
Much
Useful
Never
Wild
Late
Magic

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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.
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People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
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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.
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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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Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.
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You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
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Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
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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.
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The real world is horrible.
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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.
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I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.
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Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do? Oh, absolutely, Quentin said. Maybe even more.
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The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for.
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Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.
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I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.
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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.
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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.
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Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.
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I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.
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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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