I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.

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.

Society is now one polished horde Formed of two mighty tribes the Bores and Bored.

I'll let you in on a secret: I can't stand Jay Ward. I hate being compared to Rocky and Bullwinkle. It's just a different style of humor.

In exalting the faculties of the soul, we annihilate, in a great degree, the delusion of the senses.

My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.

A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.

I'd like to be an architect. That would be cool. I like drawing.

I think in order to keep America great, we have to keep America creative.

You can't go to an LSD or pot party unless you take it yourself. If I want to go, I must take drugs myself.

A sense of humor is an escape valve for the pressures of life.

despite all our desperate, eternal attempts to separate, contain and mend, categories always leak.