Like wine, Provençal magic had its own distinctive terror. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. Furthermore, it concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief.

— Lev Grossman

Living in a castle is objectively romantic.

— Lev Grossman

Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

— Lev Grossman

Needless to say, that meant that the Trackballs student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.

— Lev Grossman

Now that he was teaching Quentin could see why the faculty didn't bother trying to improve the climate. It kept people amazingly focused. … You could actually watch as the determination to seize the moment and live life to the fullest ebbed right out of them, and they resigned themselves to lonely, silent, indoor study instead.

— Lev Grossman

Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex.

— Lev Grossman

Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first.

— Lev Grossman

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.

— Lev Grossman

She was the most beautiful, terrible thing he'd ever seen, like an acetylene flame, an incandescent filament, a fallen star right in front of him.

— Lev Grossman

She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else

— Lev Grossman