We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.

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.

Follow your heart, not the latest headlines.

Tracy had never been so conscious of the sky above the earth, the dangerous clouds that gathered there, the way humans lived beneath such grandeur and threat every moment of their lives.

If the truth conflicts with my beliefs, I change my beliefs.

Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here; and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand.

I think the director is becoming more important. To work under rushed conditions, you need to have an extremely professional director. If the director's good than the end result will be good.

A bands first albums usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

If there is an exotic woman it's always a terrorist role.

The chance to love and be loved exists no matter who or where you are.

It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.