What I want is to get done what the people desire to have done, and the question for me is how to find that out exactly.
You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
For 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.
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.
I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.
If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.
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.
In football, I need full concentration even though I really enjoy it.
Art lives and dies in the unique heart of he who carries it, just as all feelings only live and expand in the souls of those who feel them. There is no history of art -- there is the history of artists.
One of the most fascinating aspects of politician-watching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.
Of course Seattle loves soccer. You can see from the men's Seattle Sounders team.