It's a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you're supposed to like it.

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.

The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.

Leaving your dreams and living someone's dreams is like dipping a pole into a pool to catch a weaver bird alive! It doesn't work that way... Pursue what God sent you for!

It is really a great feeling to win a World Cup on your birthday.

Honesty is not only "the first step toward greatness," - it is greatness itself.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

The wolf always charges the lamb with muddying the stream.

When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.

The songs keep on writing themselves, and I really love them. It's as close as I get to a religion.

War must be made as intense and awful as possible in order to make it short, and thus to diminish its horrors.

For monarchs seldom sigh in vain.