"If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don't change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't. You deal with it, and you get on with your life."

"Little children don't know that. Magical thinking: that's what Fraud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded." [216]

"I think you're magical 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." [217]

I just finished reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman, and am eager to dive into its sequel, The Magician King.

Fox is developing a network television series adaptation of The Magicians. Godspeed. Lost was a hit, and The Magicians is mighty similar to Lost.

When I was young, I dreamed of escaping from a straitjacket while trapped inside a water torture tank with a spinning buzzsaw descending from above and a fire growing below – "Triple Jeopardy."

Nowadays, I dream of a performing a flourish routine set to this song that culminates with me somehow converting my head into a ball maze and then navigating a ping pong ball from the back of my head to my mouth with only the use of my neck.

"The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore." [199]

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