"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."

"The irony was quite comprehensively hideous."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"“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.”"

"“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?”"

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

"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."

"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."

"“It’s a funny thing about the old gods,” he said. “You think that just because they’re old they must be difficult to kill. But when the fighting starts, they go down just like anybody else. They aren’t stronger, they’re just older.”"

"“Sure, but real life’s not actually like that,” Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. “You don’t just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You’re not going to be a character in a story, there’s nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn’t work like that.”"

"New York’s magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious."

"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."

"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."

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

"“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.”"

"“Wishes are for children,” Jane Chatwin said. “I grew up.”"

"Has it crossed your mind that you don’t have to go off on a holy crusade every time things don’t go your way?"

"“Any idea where we’re going?” “We discussed this. That’s not how quests work. We’re not going to think about it, we’re just going to journey.” “I can’t not think about it.” “Well, don’t overthink it.” “I can’t help it!” Janet said. “Whatever, you can do the not-thinking for both of us.”"

"“I’m making a serious point.” “Yes, and I am mocking your serious point to show how ludicrous it is.”"

"“What is that thing?” Quentin said. “This?” Betsy held up the knife, studying its edge. “This is why I’m here. This is what I’ve always wanted. This is a weapon for killing gods.” “Why would you want to do that?” “Have you ever met a fucking god?” “I guess I can see your point.”"

"When he graduated he’d thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero’s journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn’t how it worked."

"The war we are losing is with time."

"It was always easier to screw up somebody else’s spell than it was to cast one yourself. That was one of the many small unfairnesses of magic."

"There was nothing—in Eliot’s admittedly limited experience—more tedious than virtue."

"But that was the thing about the old days: they were old. This was his life now. He was content, and if not happy then happier than he ever thought he’d be again. He had work to do….The past was what it was, his home was here, and anything else was a fantasy."

"His heart went out to that weird, solitary man in his uncomfortable hut. He’d never met him. They wouldn’t have had much to say to each other if they had. But whoever that hermit was, he obviously despised his fellow man, and that meant he was OK in Eliot’s book."

"If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine."

"There was a lot to do. Death was an existential catastrophe, a rip in the soft upholstery with which humanity padded over a hard uncaring universe, but it turned out there were an amazing number of people whose job it was to deal with it for you, and all they asked in return were huge quantities of time and money."

"Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there’s more to life than dreaming. He was going to live in the real world from now on, and he was going to learn to appreciate its rough, mundane solidity."

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

"It was a bookstore, and he felt at home in bookstores, and he hadn’t had that feeling much lately. He was going to enjoy it. He pushed his way back through the racks of greeting cards and cat calendars, back to where the actual books were, his glasses steaming up and his coat dripping on the thin carpet. It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home."

"Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it. Maybe it was all a game, that got crumpled up and thrown away at the end, but while you were here it was real."

"Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering."

"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."

"Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out."

"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."

"That’s when they turned to religion. At this Julia pushed her chair back from the table. She could feel her intellectual gag reflex about to kick in."