Royal Assassin Quotations

Stop thinking of what you intend to do. Stop thinking of what you have just done. Then, stop thinking that you have stopped thinking of those things. Then you will find the Now, the time that stretches eternal, and is really the only time there is.

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Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad.

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No man is so dangerous as the man who cannot decide what he fears.

A Game of Thrones Quotations

A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.

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Winter is coming.

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When you play the game of thrones you win or you die.

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There is only one god and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: “Not today."

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Quotations

Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.

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This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink. If you’re reading this book every night for months, something is not right.

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I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. Then I just lap it up. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character. They're all participating in the same level of made-up awesomeness, and I enjoy every second of it.

Quotations from The Imperfectionists

You can’t dread what you can’t experience. The only death we experience is that of other people. That’s as bad as it gets. And that’s bad enough, surely.

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So why do you kiss someone?" she asks. "To give pleasure or to take it?

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Good reporting and good behavior are mutually exclusive.

Quotations from Cirque du Freak: A Living Nightmare

If this were a made-up story, it would begin at night, with a storm blowing and owls hooting and rattling noises under the bed.

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You stole from a member of the undead.

Hyperion Quotations

But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.

Parasol Protectorate Quotations

“He is clearly bookish. I did not follow a single word of their conversation at dinner last night, not one jot of it. He must be bookish.”

“A man was attacking me with a wet handkerchief.”

“Ivy Hisselpenny was the unfortunate victim of circumstances that dictated she be only-just-pretty, only-just-wealthy, and possessed of a terrible propensity for wearing extremely silly hats.”

Quotations from Poison Study

“Everyone makes choices in life. Some bad, some good. It's called living, and if you want to bow out, then go right ahead. But don't do it halfway. Don't linger in whiner's limbo.”

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“I peered deeper and found my soul. A little tattered and with some holes, but there all the same. It had always been there, I realized with shock.”

The Magician King Quotations

"Careful what you hunt," Julia said, "lest you catch it."

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"...that's not Fillory. Your kingdom ends here. Here you're a king, you're all-powerful. You're not king of any of that. Out there you're just Quentin. Are you sure that's going to be enough?"

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Here he was powerful. There, he didn't know what he was.

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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.

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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.

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

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Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn't get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

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

Quotations from The Assassin's Apprentice

“When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.”

“Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.”

“Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.”

“Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.”

"Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too."

"We left. Walking uphill and into the wind. That suddenly seemed a metaphor for my whole life."

Bonk! Quotations

“It is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls.”

“The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: 'I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat.”

“Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap...The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman. ”

“Viagra isn't the only drug being prescribed off-label for women with arousal problems. Los Angeles urologist Jennifer Berman told me some doctors are prescribing low doses of Ritalin. Drugs like Ritalin improve a person's focus, so it stands to reason that it would make it easier to stay attuned to subtle changes taking place in one's body. 'It enables a woman to focus on the task at hand,' said Berman, managing, though surely not intending, to make sex sound like homework.”

Favorite Quotations from The Magicians

Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.

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...you couldn't have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.

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He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn't think what else to do.

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All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn't be it. It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he'd been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead.

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In Fillory things mattered in a way they didn't in this world. In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.

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The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.

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If the interviewer actually turned out to be a gatekeeper to the magical land of Fillory, he thought, it was too bad he wasn't wearing more practical shoes.

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He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping an uncertain toe into those intoxicating carbonated waters. It wasn't something he'd had much practice at.

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Learning magic was nothing like that. It turned out to be about as tedious as it was possible for the study of powerful and mysterious supernatural forces to be.

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Once magic was real everything else just seemed to unreal.

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Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They're bored with their lives, and there's nothing they can do about it. They're eaten alive by longing, and they're dead before they die.

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That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bonb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog. To tell you the truth I'm kind of glad he hit you.

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...it was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you...

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It never failed to astonish him, then or ever, how much of the world around him was mysterious and hidden from view.

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"The problem with growing up," Quentin said, "is that once you're grown up, people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore."

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I think you're magicians because you're unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.

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We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.

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It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though -- and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger -- he was angry only because his position was so weak.

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He'd started that little speech speaking normally and he ended it shouting. In a way fighting like this was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.

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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. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.

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There's no getting away from yourself. Not even in Fillory.

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Now he had answers, but they weren't doing what answers were supposed to do: they weren't making things simpler or easier. They weren't helping.

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He could have eked out his sad wasted life with movies and books and masturbation and alcohol like everybody else. He would never have known the horror of really getting what he thought he wanted. He could have spared himself and everybody else the cost of it.

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Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it'll only turn you into a monster. Better to stay home and do card tricks in your bedroom instead.

Hero

He is a hero because he refuses to become like all the rest.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi

Breathe

A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter the world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi

Monster

"Whoever fights monsters," Nietzsche had said, "should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi

Secret

Upsilamba become part of our increasing repository of coded words and expressions, a repository that grew over time until gradually we had created a secret language of our own. That word became a symbol, a sign of that vague sense of joy, the tingle in the spine Nabokov expected his reader to feel in the art of reading fiction; it was a sensation that separated the good readers, as he called them, from the ordinary ones. It also became the code word that opened the secret cave of remembrance.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi

Stranger

I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home." I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi

Empathy

A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic -- not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels -- the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi

Dreams

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

Fairy Tale

Every fairytale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairytale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present there is an affirmation of the life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. This is why we love Madame Bovary and cry for Emma, why we greedily read Lolita as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi