The Last Graduate Quotes
"You don’t want mysterious unexplained advice from someone you know has your best interests at heart and whose judgment is unerringly right and just and true."
"I can say with authority that they wouldn’t like it if they got it."
"Either they’ll tell you to do what you want to do anyway, in which case you didn’t need their advice, or they’ll tell you to do the opposite, in which case you’ll have to choose between sullenly following their advice, like a little kid who has been forced to brush her teeth and go to bed at a reasonable hour, or ignoring it and grimly carrying on, all the while knowing that your course of action is guaranteed to lead you straight to pain and dismay."
"The only saving grace of the whole painful trip was that I kept my storing crystal tightly clenched in my fist the whole time, concentrating on pushing mana into it."
"You’re allowed to specify up to three classes, and as long as you’ve met all your requirements, the Scholomance has to rework the rest of your schedule around them, but if you don’t know what other classes there actually are or when they’re scheduled, it’s just a gambling game that you’re sure to lose."
"The Scholomance isn’t really conducive to holidaymaking, to be fair."
"My problem was that I’d been assigned four highly dangerous seminar classes, and I was already far behind on saving mana for graduation."
"Everyone gets a private room in here, so to squash in each year’s delivery of freshmen, the rooms are arranged cellblock-style, stacked on top of one another with a narrow iron walkway outside the upper rooms."
"We all know that’s a story. The single biggest source of the school’s mana is us."
"I’ve got to get to class," I said, and escaped to the comparative safety of my independent study down in the bowels of the school, where the worst thing that was going to leap at me with devouring attention was a flesh-eating monster.
"Shouldn’t you at least be able to turn invisible or something by now?" I’d told her in a grumble under my breath before tipping her back into Liu’s cage.
"If I’m taking point for a walk mid-period, I’ll go by myself."
"I spent the rest of the period making a clean copy of the original Sanskrit spell, along with a formal spell commentary of my own, including word-for-word translations of the spell into modern Sanskrit and English to help convey meaning, with several possible variations in connotation, an analysis of the Arabic commentary, and notes on the potential usage."
"I didn’t need to do any of that. There wasn’t an assignment I had to hand in, and I certainly didn’t need to do the work to cast the spell."
"The rule is that 50 percent of the graduating class makes it out, but that doesn’t mean it’s even odds."
"It’s one of Mum’s, if you couldn’t tell already."
"So the ones who die almost all come out of the 60 percent who don’t have an enclaver on their side."
"It wouldn’t improve Cora’s odds any to be going into the second half of the semester with a bad arm that she’d got because she’d screwed up and misjudged the amount of effort to put into her shop assignment."
"The underlying principle is that you have to get a group of people to willingly put aside their selves and offer their time and energy to help perform a working for someone else’s benefit that doesn’t help any of them directly."
"You don’t do anything for anyone without some kind of return, and the return’s always got to be something solid, unless there’s some more substantial connection in place: an alliance, dating, something."
"If the cleansing machinery down in the graduation hall really had got fixed, if it stayed fixed this year, they might make it out after all."
"You could ask people to be brave, you could ask them to be kind, you could ask them to care, you could ask them to help; you could ask them for a thousand hard and painful things. But not when it was so obviously useless."
"We’re the real apex predators, not the maw-mouths that after all just sit by the doors mumbling to themselves and occasionally groping around for some supper."
"If you deliberately do something that you are conscious and deeply terrified might cause pregnancy, the magical intent gets confused."
"You don’t even get to prioritize your own bloody life when you’re going down the stairs first with your heart in your throat."
"Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it."
"Having a choice meant being able to choose something that worked for you and whatever you were carrying and whatever you’d prepared. Having a choice meant you got to choose getting out."
"I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew what I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going through. I wasn’t going through until everyone was out."
"I didn’t have the right to do that. I didn’t have the right to do anything except the one thing I had the right to do—to get out of the gates—because we all agreed that we had that right."
"It wasn’t even heroism; it was just a bad equation that didn’t balance."
"It was understood that your promises stopped counting when you got close enough to the gates, and nobody would ever blame you for going through as soon as you could, even if everyone else on your team died."
"You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week."
"If they want your help they will come. Until then you should worry less how you will save them and worry more how they will get in your way."
"We’re all getting wiped out as it is. Even the kids doing only one of the runs."
"But it is only lucky that no one died this week. And it is still only the beginning! If they don’t start practicing before the end, there will be no hope for them."
"I’ll get you a potion that will hold you for the run."
"I don’t suppose they let you talk them out of it?"
"That’s right, don’t even try. You’re not going to win. We’re going to get everyone out. I’m going to get everyone out."
"We cannot keep running in without any organization. This is not a good strategy when we are all collaborating."
"You’d rather run away and wallow in angst than ask for help or anything else extremely horrible like that."
"It’s just as well that I was too appalled to move, I suppose, because that’s why I was still on my feet when Orion looked up and saw something coming."
"Even as I turned round to find out what it was, my hands were already moving in the shielding spell that Alfie had given me, two weeks ago."
"It was an evocation of refusal—not to be too boringly technical, an evocation is more or less taking something intangible and bringing it into material reality."
"But when I cast the evocation, I got a globe nearly twelve feet across, which showed every sign of staying up for as long as I bothered to keep it going."
"We’re all on alert for anything like a potential advantage, so everyone started grabbing for it immediately."
"I pulled mana in on one breath and spread my arms out on the exhale, chanting the opening incantation."
"I knew what was on the other side waiting, and they weren’t going to bother coming after one measly student."
"I couldn’t make myself step through. Even if it was safe right now, in some ridiculous sense of the word, I didn’t want to go look."
"You could fatten yourself back up as soon as you were safe at home."
"And then they’d recovered and tried to fill their hollow bellies by devouring all the rest of the surviving mals instead."
"I came in here and I’ve survived in here being sensible all the time, trying to always do the cleverest thing I could manage, to see all the clear and sharp-edged dangers from every angle, so I could just barely squeeze past them without losing too much blood."
"I could never afford to look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive and useless as happiness, and I don’t believe in it anyway."
"Orion didn’t look over at me again, even when he surfaced in between the killing waves; he was too busy."
"I wanted them all to make it. I’d missed Khamis going, and Jowani and Cora; they were already gone."
"Everyone else was doing stupid things all round me—that whole last week, I was constantly stumbling over people making out in the library stacks."
"I hate my name, I’ve hated my name my whole life; everyone who ever said it and looked at me and smiled, it’s packed full of their smiles."
"I didn’t want to; I was fighting hope away as fiercely as Orion was fighting mals."
"The first thing that came into my head was, I couldn’t do it alone."
"Orion wobbled himself, on the lowest step, and looked round wildly at the mals that had just been pushed out of his reach."
"He turned to me and said, 'El, I love you so much.'"