About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell... I defy anybody to read the first page and not keep going to the last.

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

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

He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.

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.

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Fill your heart with pure love

Take one more step because it might be the last one needed.

If you got the game, you got the game. That's why Tiger Woods is out there playing golf with Greg Norman.

Don't say yes to everything. Learn how to say no, because people respect a no.

Last good pratfall I did, I broke bones in both hands. I still feel it when people shake my hand.

At the rate we're going, the 21st century looks pretty clear. It's going to be pretty violent

There is so much to teach, and the time goes so fast.

Rosabelle - answer - tell - pray, answer - look - tell - answer, answer - tell.

Do you have it on your person?" my father asked. "Jesus" I replied. "My person has it in her purse.