I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

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

He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.

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.

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

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.

Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

You will never know who you truly are until you can find a quiet place to sit and think. A place where you can get lost in hopes of finding yourself

A gun doesn't have the brain to hate with, or a finger to pull the trigger, so the problem isn't the gun.

Why should I try to make you believe the things I believe in?

I do not love fiction, I love history.

People would look at me weird. You know, like, 'Why is this guy's hands always in his pockets?' But I was embarrassed by the size of my hands.

So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.

Compassion is an alternate perception

Even though you're growing up, you should never stop having fun.

The older I grow, the more I see behind the idea of the Hindus that man is the greatest of all beings.

The only colour I see is this wonderful green and blue planet.