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.

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

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.

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.

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.

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

Blue screen of death: she'd crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.

Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it.

What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn't an adventure?

You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes, ” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.

Living in a castle is objectively romantic.

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert.

Your optimism today will determine your level of success tomorrow.

I can't take much pride in my childhood acting. It feels like it happened in another lifetime, and even then, it felt like a hobby.

But you grab a moment, or you let it pass.

I was 47 when I got pregnant. I'd been trying for a couple of years and thought it would never happen.

Don't think about the start of the race, think about the ending.

To the very limited extent that I have a political consciousness, to some extent I'm a lazy, apolitical sort of guy that just flits around.

We live in a war of two antagonistic ethical philosophies, the ethical policy taught in the books and schools, and the success policy.