Lev Grossman

This was the real Brakebills. He was in the warm secret heart of the secret world.

The grappa was like a fiery seed that had drifted into Quentin’s chest and taken root there. The seed gave birth to a hot, glowing sapling, which grew and spread and unfolded into a big warm leafy tree of good feeling.

Brakebills felt less like a secret garden and more like a fortified encampment. He wasn’t in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad, bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren’t their fault.

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.

Quentin was losing interest in communicating anyway. He should have been ravenous for human contact, but instead he felt himself falling away from the others, deeper inside himself.

Perfection was part of Quentin’s mythology of Brakebills, the story he told himself about his life there, a narrative as carefully constructed and reverently maintained as Fillory and Further, and he wanted to be able not just to tell it to himself but to believe it.

One way or another the bonds that held them together were starting to fray, they were losing their magical ability to effortlessly love one another. Now, even though things would never be the same, even though they’d never be together in the same way, at least he could always remember it the way he wanted to. The memories were safe, sealed forever in amber.

You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters. You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails.

Let’s never get like this, with these stupid hobbies nobody cares about. Just doing pointless things all day and hating each other and waiting to die.

They don’t even know, Quentin. They think they’re happy. That’s the worst part.