The Magicians Quotes
"Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world."
"You wouldn’t put off college. You would abandon college. Brakebills would be your college."
"Magic, Quentin discovered, wasn’t romantic at all. It was grim and repetitive and deceptive."
"But there was a more seductive, more dangerous truth to Fillory that Quentin couldn’t let go of."
"Everybody knew what everybody else was going to say before they said it."
"He was finally on the other side, down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass."
"He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy."
"In Brooklyn reality had been empty and meaningless—whatever inferior stuff it was made of, meaning had refused to adhere to it."
"He was going to learn magic! He was either the greatest genius of all time or the biggest idiot."
"If he didn’t feel like a magician yet, at least he could look like one."
"Blood thundering in his ears, he produced it from either hand, from his mouth, from his nose."
"Magic was a lot wonkier than Quentin thought it would be."
"Magic was about as tedious as it was possible for the study of powerful and mysterious supernatural forces to be."
"If a spell was going to work, then on some gut level you had to mean it."
"He wondered who or what could possibly have convinced somebody with such obvious gifts that she should be frightened of other people."
"You live in the magical world, and it’s a great gift."
"He could not have guessed to the nearest twenty-four hours how long he’d been asleep."
"He sighed and resigned himself to being a man again."
"His view was of broken snowfields beneath a white sky, stretching out to the horizon."
"You cannot study magic. You cannot learn it. You must ingest it. Digest it."
"When he wishes to cast a spell he simply casts it."
"You have been studying magic the way a parrot studies Shakespeare."
"It is a task best performed in silence and isolation."
"The human brain was not meant to ingest these quantities of information."
"Magic was a complicated, fiddly instrument that had to be calibrated precisely to the context in which it operated."
"In reality, magic was complex and chaotic and organic."
"For the true magician, there is no very clear line between what lies inside the mind and what lies outside it."
"The landscape had, if anything, gotten more monotonous."
"He leaned on the iron magical vigor that his sojourn under Professor Mayakovsky had given him."
"The passage from Brakebills to the outside world was a well-traveled one."
"Being smart and practically immortal, dragons tended to stash away all kinds of odd bits of wisdom."
"Magic wasn’t simply random, it had an actual shape—a fractal, chaotic shape."
"Quentin’s tolerance was low, and he refused to spit as a matter of principle, so he just ended up getting drunk every night."
"They built the school to be near them, and not the other way around."
"A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it."
"It’s irregular and beautiful. It’s not an artifact, it’s something else, something organic."
"No one gets punished for anything. We do whatever we want, and that’s all we do, and nobody stops us, and nobody cares."
"If He left us His tools, He left them for a reason."
"A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength."
"We are dealing with a scenario where there is a Person who built the house, and then He left."
"Magic... partakes of a higher regularity, a higher order, that we haven’t been allowed to see."
"We’re not plugging our tools into the right socket. Maybe there’s a much bigger socket—"
"What we’ve got are hand tools. Black and Decker. I don’t see how you get from there to what you’re talking about."
"Nothing meant anything, but what was meaning anyway but a burden that weighed them down?"
"Their little planet was ruined, and there was nowhere left for him to stand."
"It was as if Eliot were their beloved son, whom they were lovingly tucking in for the night."
"You could use them for anything you wanted, good or evil."
"The real world just doesn’t work like that."
"If I die doing this, at least I'll have done something."
"Don't talk to me about death. You don't know anything about it."
"We had problems, but we could have fixed them."
"You don’t even want it. Even if this whole thing came off without a hitch, you wouldn’t be happy."
"We are so very far from the capital here, and many have ruled these green hills, or tried, since the last time you children of Earth walked them."
"You don’t know anyone here; you have no history, no scores to settle. You belong to no faction."
"This is bad, Quentin. Somebody’s going to get hurt."
"We have lived too long. The great days are past."
"You gave up on Brooklyn and on Brakebills, and I fully expect you to give up on Fillory when the time comes."
"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."
"Even if they decided to take the button home, at this point it would be hard to muster everybody in one place to actually do it."
"It’s a funny thing about the old gods, you think that just because they’re old they must be difficult to kill."
"I wasn’t going to go back to Earth after I’d seen Fillory."
"This is by far the best outcome I’ve ever achieved."
"No more. It’s time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost."
"He should have stayed in Brooklyn, in the real world."
"Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it’ll only turn you into a monster."
"The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything."
"It was a shock to suddenly be surrounded by so many of his fellow human beings again at such close quarters."
"Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up."
"Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer."
"He hadn’t done this for a while. Loosening his tie with one hand, Quentin stepped out into the cold clear winter air and flew."
"The thing is, I’d hate to cut out right before bonus season."
"Everybody’s forgiven you but you. And you are so far behind us."