This time with feeling. I reread The Magicians and thought you might like to see some of my favorite quotes so that maybe you'd want to read it too.
"His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he'd gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between" p64
"It occurred to him, long after it should have, that he wasn't the only person here who had problems and felt like an outsider. Alice wasn't just the competition, someone whose only purpose in life was to succeed and by doing so subtract from his happiness. She was a person with her own hopes and feelings and history and nightmares. In her own way she was as lost as he was," p67
"When he saw Julia, he searched himself for the old love he used to feel for her. It wasn't gone, but it was a dull, distant ache, still there but healed over - just the shrapnel they couldn't remove," p72
"The entire time he'd been at Brakebills, through First Year, the exams, the whole disaster with Penny, right up until the night he joined the Physical Kids, Quentin had been holding his breath without knowing it. He realized only now that he'd been waiting for Brakebills to vanish around him like a daydream. Even aside from the many and varied laws of thermodynamics that were violated there on a regular basis, it was just too good to be true. It was like Fillory that way. Fillory never lasted forever. Ember and Umber promptly kicked the Chatwins out at the end of every book. Deep down Quentin felt like a tourist who at the end of the day would be herded back onto some dirty, lumbering, snorting tour bus - with ripped vinyl seats and overhead TVs and a stinking toilet - and shipped home, clutching a tacky souvenir postcard and watching as the towers and hedges and peaks and gables of Brakebills dwindled in the rearview mirror. But it hadn't happened. And now he understood. he really got, that it wasn't going to happen. He'd wasted so much time thinking, It's all a dream, and It should have been somebody else, and Nothing lasts forever. It was time he started acting like who he was: a nineteen year old student at a secret college for real, actual magic," p106
"Janet was about as annoying as a person could be and still be your friend, but Quentin was never bored around her. She was passionately loyal, and if she was obnoxious it was only because she was so deeply tender-hearted. It made her easily wounded, and when she was wounded she lashed out. She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone," p108
"You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn't, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn't. Put it in perspective. Something like that. Or otherwise what was the point? He didn't know if he could explain it to Josh. But maybe he could show him," p133
"It was an amazing outpouring of collective joy. Quentin had forgotten he was capable of that emotion, the way a lost spelunker feels like there was never such a thing as sunlight, that it was just a cruel fiction," p154
"What was he going to do? What exactly? Every ambition he'd ever had in his life had been realized the day he was admitted to Brakebills, and he was struggling to formulate a new one with any kind of practical specificity," p210
"I got my heart's desire, he thought, and there my troubles began," p220
"She always kept a cool head in difficult moments, maybe because she tended to be so out of control so much of the rest of the time," p233
"'What are you, a child? You got confused? Why didn't you just end it, Quentin? You obviously lost interest a long time ago. You really are a child, aren't you? You're obviously not enough of a man to have a real relationship. You're not even enough of a man to end a real relationship. Do I have to do absolutely everything for you? Or you know what it is? You hate yourself so much, you'll hurt anybody who loves you. That's it, isn't it? Just to get even with them for loving you. I never saw that before now.'" p254
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