Lev Quotes

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

I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.

Through others we become ourselves.

It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

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.

[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. 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.

Are you kidding? That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog.

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.

Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

In a way fighting 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.

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?

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

You...you lost your faith?" "No...just my convictions. I still very much believe in God- just not a god who condones human tithing." Lev begins to feel himself choking up with an unexpected flood of feeling, all the emotions that had been building up throughout their talk- throughout the weeks- arriving all at once like a sonic boom. "I never knew there was a choice.

Something that is yours forever is never precious

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

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

No true hero ever believes that they are one.

We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.

She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else

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

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.

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

You should never apologize for existing, Lev. Not even to all those people out there who wish you didn't.

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.

You can’t just decide to be happy.” “No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?

Write me a tragedy, Lev Fedorov,” she whispered to him. “Write me a litany of sins. Write me a plague of devastation. Write me lonely, write me wanting, write me shattered and fearful and lost. Then write me finding myself in your arms, if only for a night, and then write it again. Write it over and over, Lev, until we both know the pages by heart. Isn’t that a story, too?” she asked him softly.

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

All this time, Lev ever realized what he needed. He did not need to be adored or pitied. He needed to be forgiven. Not by God, who is all forgiving. Not by people like Marcus and Pastor Dan, who would always stand by his side. He needed to be forgiven by an unforgiving world.

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.

Cowards hide [...] but warriors lie and wait [...] the only difference is whether you're motivated by fear or purpose.

Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.

It's not a pretty world, Papa.' 'I've noticed,' my father said softly.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

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.

Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction.

There is really no end to life's little humiliations.

Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.

If you need to talk about your childhood, you’re safe with me. If you need to break into a million pieces, I’m right here, Lev. I’ll find them all, I’m good at details, and I’ll put you back together. You’re safe here.

Sometimes, Lev, I just want to smack you." "You already hit him with a car.

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.

Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.

So," says Lev, as casually as he can, "you wanna dance?" "Do you believe in the end of the world?" she responds. Lev shrugs. "I don't know. Why?" "Because the day after that is when I'll dance with you.

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.

Seeds must be sown everywhere. Only some will bear fruit. But there would not be the fruit from the few had the many not been sown.

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.

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.

Drinks were a lot like books, really: it didn’t matter where you were, the contents of a vodka tonic were always more or less the same, and you could count on them to take you away to somewhere better or at least make your present arrangements seem more manageable.

They say penguins mate for life.” He reached up again and jerked hard at his tie. “And I want to be your penguin.

A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.

The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty... not to reassure him, but to upset him.

His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.

I’m not ashamed of who you are. And the only time I would look down on you is if I were helping you back up.

I have a little theory that I'd like to air here, if I may. What is it that you think makes you magicians?" More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical-question territory now anyway. He spoke more softly. "Is it because you are intelligent? Is it because you are brave and good? Is is because you're special? Maybe. Who knows. But I'll tell you something: 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. Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

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.

Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.

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

Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out.

Look, who's the talking bear here?” Quentin snapped. “Is it you? Are you the talking fucking bear? All right. So shut the fuck up.

My arms around her waist tightened a little. I never wanted to let go. “I don’t know what love is,” I started quietly. “But if I could love anyone…” I pressed a gentle kiss behind her ear, pulling her close. “I would love you. Very much.

You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here!

Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.

I don't know how to phrase this exactly but what the fuck?

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.

I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, by manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool.

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.

The teacher must adopt the role of facilitator not content provider.

Suffering "buys" something, and this something possesses a certain value for all of us, for common consciousness; by suffering we buy the right to judge.

She was the most beautiful, terrible thing he'd ever seen, like an acetylene flame, an incandescent filament, a fallen star right in front of him.

Lev looks at Risa, almost afraid to ask the obvious question. Finally he says, 'Uh...why do we have a baby?' 'Ask him,' says Risa. Stone-faced, Conner looks out of the window. 'They're looking for two boys and a girl. Having a baby will throw them off.' 'Great,' snaps Risa. 'Maybe we should all pick up a baby along the way.

I am dangerously close to falling in love with you,” he tilted his head in thought before adding, “if not already there.

By giving our students practice in talking with others, we give them frames for thinking on their own.

Most people have two emergency modes. But Connor always knew he had three: Fight, Flight, and Screw Up Royally. It was a dangerous mental circuit.

Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.

That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

Magic doesn't come from talent, it comes from pain.

This is Mina. She was homeless. I found her. I’m keeping her. She loves me. So we’re getting married.” And I died. Embarrassment seeped out of me like oozing slime.

Remember? In the car. You told me that you planned to marry one man, and that one man would be me. I agree with you. I think you should marry me.

You don’t just go to somebody and say, ‘I’m a better person because you’re in my head.

Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.

Damn right! The time of your life! Gotta wrap up all those life events, all those parties, into one - birthdays, wedding, funeral." THen he turns to their father. "Very efficient, right, Dad?".... "Here's to my brother, Lev," Marcus says. "And to our parents! Who have always done the right thing. The appropriate thing. Who have always given generously to charity. Who have always given 10 percent of everything to our church. Hey, Mom - we're lucky you had ten kids instead of five, otherwise we'd end up having to cut Lev off at the waist!

Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?

we among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would.

It was funny how just when you thought you knew yourself through and through, you stumbled on a new kind of strength, a fresh reserve of power inside you that you never knew you had, and all at once you found yourself burning a little brighter and hotter than you ever had before.

I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.

...In books there's always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world's in danger, evil's on the rise, but if you're really quick and take this ring and put it in that volcano over there everything will be fine. "But in real life that guy never turns up. He's never there. He's busy handing out advice in the next universe over. In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't. There's no answers in the back of the book.

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone’s just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you’ve figured it out and done it, you’ll never know whether you were right or wrong. You’ll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn’t.

For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other’s throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting—an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.

You can't just decide to be happy." "No, you can't. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want? Do you want to be the asshole who went to Fillory and was miserable there? Even in Fillory? Because that's who you are right now." There was something true about what Alice was saying. But he couldn't grasp it. It was too complex, or too simple. Too something...It was strange: he's thought that doing magic was the hardest thing he would ever do, but the rest of it was so much harder. It turned out that magic was the easy part.

Who sleeps in my bed at night?” I buried my nose in his neck and mumbled, “I do.” “You do,” he confirmed. “And who makes me smile?” “I smiled against the stubble on his throat. “Me.” “Exactly.” He turned to kiss my cheek. “No one else. It’s you. It’s always been you.” He spoke softly, “I just needed to find you. Now that I have you, I won’t be letting you go. Okay?” “Okay,” I whispered, feeling my jealousy slip away.

He'd been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The word was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring - a moving oasis. He wasn't desolate, and he wasn't empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it, that's what being a magician was. They weren't ordinary feelings - they weren't the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.

This is a feeling that you had, Quentin, she said. Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many people ever experience. That's where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.