I think every fantasy reader secretly believes they know how magic works.

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.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

Did Brother Zachariah just steal our cat?

When I was 17, I signed my record deal and passed my driver's test. It was a very good year!

A boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.

Beside some philosophers of larger vision, Carlyle stands like an honest, half-despairing boy, grasping at some details only of their world systems.

As the happiness of the people is the sole end of government, so the consent of the people is the only foundation of it.

It doesn't matter if your ignorant so long as you can find people to know stuff for you.

We're on the other side of the fence now, Lena,' she says, tiredly, as she passes. "Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel.

Courage is fear that prays.

Make yourself a priority. Fill yourself up so that you can give more to others.