Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.

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.

[…] God gives grace for the situation, not the imagination.

Indeed, God is always with us even when things look hopeless.

the greatest Americanshave not been born yetthey are waiting patientlyfor the past to die

Recognize that you are enough, and that all external gifts are simply extra blessings.

It's probably the worst feeling in the world, when you're deeply and madly in love with a woman and you know she's not feeling you the same way, and you don't know why.

...no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love.

History is not life, but since only life makes history, the union of the two is obvious.

There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature.

I'm not a method guy. I can't be bothered to have a method. I just want to be a part of a good movie and I can't stand to be surrounded by morons.

The Secular City, having legislated and litigated itself out of any entanglement with the City of God, would be a hell upon earth .