Journalists From Massachusetts

"The dead didn’t mince words."

"You know what women are like? They’re like those long, skinny blocks you get in Tetris, the ones made out of four blocks straight in a row. First when you need them you can’t get any, then when you don’t need them anymore they’re fucking everywhere and you don’t know what to do with them."

"“If there’s a bright side to the galaxy,” Peter said, more or less aimlessly, “we’re on the planet that’s farthest from it.”"

"“A Man, a Plan, a Bacchanal: Anomie,” said Peters, grandly."

"Who would’ve thought doing nothing all the time would turn out to be so damn tiring?"

"But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn’t happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn’t think what else to do."

"…it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better."

"But now that the ripened fruit of all that preparation was right in front of him he suddenly lost any desire for it. He wasn’t surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you’ve done all the work to get something you don’t even want it anymore. He had it all the time. It was one of the few things he could depend on."

"“The Dean will probably be down to get you in another minute,” Eliot said. “Here’s my advice. Sit there…and try to look like you belong here. And if you tell him you saw me smoking, I will banish you to the lowest circle of hell. Which I’ve never been there, but if even half of what I hear is true it’s almost as bad as Brooklyn.”"

"He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world—he’d spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was."

"He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping and uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters. It wasn’t something he had much practice at."

"Quentin had never met anybody so staggeringly and unapologetically affected."

"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 went down the slide?” Benedict nodded. Quentin was evolving a theory about that. The slide was humiliating, that’s what it was. Deliberately embarrassing. That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it."

"Apparently if you’re enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted."

"Religion had never been a subject that interested Julia. She considered herself too smart to believe in things she had no evidence for, and that behaved in ways that violated every principle she’d ever observed or heard plausibly spoken about. And she considered herself too tough-minded to believe in things just because they made her feel better. Magic was one thing. With magic you were at least looking at reproducible results. But religion? That was about faith. Uneducated guesses made by weak minds."

"Where was the line between a spell and a miracle?"

"Nothing. Blue screen of death: she’d crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized."

"I’ll plead insanity. I can back it up."

"She wore a simple flowing white gown. So did everybody else. Gummidgy also wore a crown of mistletoe. So your basic Golden Bough deal, Julia thought. Fucking mistletoe. She never saw what all the fuss was about. Sure, it’s pretty enough, but at the end of the day it’s still a botanical parasite that strangles its host."

"This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself."

"The man was obviously a soldier, but Quentin had never really thought about what that meant. He was a professional killer, efficient and businesslike. He had none of Bingle’s elegance. He was like a baker, except instead of making bread he made corpses, and he wanted to make Quentin into one."

"“Is that God?” Poppy said. “That is a god,” Penny corrected her. “Though that is really just a term to describe a magician operating on a titanic power scale.”"

"“I started hanging out with this one girl, big-time warrior for one of the cities. She was very into the magic thing. And also I guess their menfolk weren’t especially well-endowed in the hardware aisle, if you take my meaning.” “I believe I grasp the essence of it, yes,” Quentin said."

"Specifically she was into dragons. Quentin suppose it was an extension of the general Australian preoccupation with fatally dangerous animals. Start with saltwater crocodiles and box jellyfish and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump up the food chain before you got to dragons."

"He threw his sword away. Screw swords. A magician doesn’t need a sword. A magician doesn’t need anything but what’s inside him."

"“A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.” “In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.”"

"Could the man really not have explained? Did his daughter really not understand what had happened? It didn’t add up. If they’d talked about it and figured things out it could have been a happy ending. People in fairy tales never just figured things out."

"“I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit,” Eliot said. “Though that would explain a lot.”"

"She was dipping a toe in the pool of bad behavior in finding the temperature was just right. It was fun being a problem. Julia had been very very good for a very long time, and the funny thing about that was, if you’re too good too much of the time, people start to forget about you. You’re not a problem, so people can strike you off their list of things to worry about. Nobody makes a fuss over you. They make a fuss over the bad girls."

"“What do you call this style?” Quentin asked. “The mistake people make,” Bingle said, “is thinking that there are different styles.” “All right.” “Force, balance, leverage, momentum—these principles never change. They are your style.”"

"In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster."

"To be honest, Quentin felt superior to anybody who still messed around with magic. They could delude themselves if they liked, those self-indulgent magical mandarins, but he’d outgrown that stuff. He wasn’t a magician anymore, he was a man, and a man took responsibility for his actions."

"Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving."

"It was fair to call it depression. She felt like shit, all the time. If that was depression, she had it. It must have been contagious. She’d caught it from the world."

"If this was madness it was an entirely new kind of madness, as yet undocumented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She had nerdophrenia. She was dorkotic."

"The sun set. The car smelled of its owner’s cigarette smoke. Everything was toxic and chemical and unnatural: the plastic walnut trim, the electric lights, the burning gasoline that was shoving them forward. This whole world was a processed petroleum product."

"Venice was the only city he’d ever seen that looked the same in real life as it did in pictures. It was consoling that something in this world met expectations."

"He had gotten it so easy, and she had it so hard, and why? There was no good reason. He passed a test, and she failed it. That was a judgment on the test, not on her, but now her life was a waking nightmare, and he had everything he ever wanted. He was living a fantasy. Her fantasy. She wanted it back."

"He couldn’t ignore how conspicuously beautiful Venice was. People had been living here for what, a thousand years? More? God only knew whose crazy idea it was to build a city in the middle of a lagoon, but you couldn’t argue with the results."

"It was too terrible to think about, so she dealt with it by not thinking about it."

"Welcome to Facelessbook: an antisocial network."

"Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change."

"She’d gotten good at coaxing. If all else failed she had the power of the bathroom handjob, and she wielded it with an iron fist."

"Sometimes I think you have an overly vivid imagination, Hollis. With some things it’s just not worth thinking about them too carefully before they happen. They almost never turn out to be as horrible as you think they will."

"A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors."

"Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there."

"You know what Arthur C. Clarke said about technology and magic, right? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Turn it around. What is advanced magic indistinguishable from? Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from the miraculous."

"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."

"The irony was quite comprehensively hideous."