Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.

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.

Are these soldiers really our enemy, or only the worst reflection of our own selves?... We made them. We have to unmake them, not just defeat or kill them.

Flying is more than a sport and more than a job; flying is pure passion and desire, which fill a lifetime.

There were shadows galore in the dim light, but there was one shadow that did not correspond to any object in the room. It lurked next to the fireplace, a formless, undulating darkness.

I wish I could take back every interview. Over and over again, I read them later, and either I'm misquoted or I said something stupid. I'm just not very good at it.

Many words are in a state of mutation, the pronunciation being unsettled even in the best society, a result that must often arise where language is as variable and undetermined as the English.

Maxims are the condensed good sense of nations.

I didn't realize then what a privilege that was: to be bored with your best friend; to have time to waste.

Indifference is the invincible grant of the world.

I was taught by professors who had done their schooling in the 1930s. Most of them were scornful of, even hated, big business.

They were always doing something. Quietly, without interruption, and with great concentration, they carried on with the hundred-and-one small things that made up their world.