"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."

"“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.”"

"“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 don’t think they can change their minds. When you get to that level of power and knowledge and perfection, the question of what you should do next gets increasingly obvious. Everything is very rule-governed. All you can ever do in any given situation is the most gloriously perfect thing, and there’s only one of them. Finally there aren’t any choices left to make at all.” “You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.”"

"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."

"“Anyway, what’s wrong with a little unreality?” Quentin said. “Unreality is underrated.”"

"“Tell me, what’s the first thing a hacker does once he breaks into a system?” “I don’t know,” Quentin said. “He steals a bunch of credit card numbers and subscribes to a lot of really premium porn sites?” “He sets up a back door.” It was good to know that even having attained enlightenment Penny was still impervious to humor. “So that if he’s ever locked out, he can get back in.”"

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

"But you couldn’t mourn forever. Or you could, but as it turned out there were better things to do."

"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."

"They were joined by Julia, who kept her sunglasses on and ate only marmite, straight from the jar, which if anything seemed like further proof of her declining humanity."

"Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for."

"“Be careful what you learn from me,” he said. “What is written with a sword cannot be erased.”"

"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."

"“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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"“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."

"The irony was quite comprehensively hideous."

"Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it’ll only turn you into a monster."

"If he couldn’t go back, he would just have to do things differently going forward. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything. The funny thing about it was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered."

"Nobody can be touched by that much power without being corrupted."

"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."

"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."

"As he got deeper into it he began to run into a lot of mathematics, which he had to work out with a pencil and paper—you couldn’t do magical equations with computers, they just spat out inconsistent answers before hanging completely. Magical math had to be thought through with a brain."

"Anyway, the mood he was in, Quentin was willing to take any position on any subject with anybody if it meant he could pick a fight."

"Some tiny sane part of him knew he was out of control, but that wasn’t the part of him that had its hands on the wheel."

"We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler."

"“Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.” “You can’t just decide to be happy.” “No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?”"

"The power to create order is one thing. The power to destroy is another. Always they are in balance. But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction."

"He had reached the outer limits of what Fun, capital F, could do for him. The cost was way too high, the returns pitifully inadequate. His mind was dimly awakening, too late, to other things that were as important, or even more so."

"They were crossing so many lines it was hard to figure out where they were anymore."

"It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either."

"“Well, but why would You create something that had the power to hurt You? Or any of Your creatures? Why don’t You help us? Do You have any idea how much we hurt? How much we suffer?” A stern glance. “I know all things, daughter.” “Well, okay, then know this.” Janet put her hands on her hips. She had struck an unexpected vein of bitterness in herself, and it was running away with her. “We human beings are unhappy all the time. We hate ourselves and we hate each other and sometimes we wish You of Whoever had never created us or this shit-ass world or any other shit-ass world. Do You realize that? So next time You might think about not doing such a half-assed job.”"

"“Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic,” Fogg said expansively. “It doesn’t really make sense. It’s a little too perfect, don’t you think? If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life. “Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking: that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.”"