“He wanted to stick his finger in it and see what happened. Some story, some quest, started here, and he wanted to go on it. It felt fresh and clean and unsafe, nothing like the heavy warm lard of palace life. The protective plastic wrap had been peeled off”

“All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn't be it. It had been diverted elsewhere, to somebody else, and he'd been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead”

“He looked like a child who had been slightly misdelivered, with some subpar forceps handling by the attending.”

“But where was he going to go, exactly? It was not considered the thing to look panicked or even especially concerned about graduation, but everything about the world after Brakebills felt dangerously vague and under-thought to Quentin. 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. This wasn't Fillory, where there was some magical war to be fought. There was no Watcherwoman to be rooted out, no great evil to be vanquished, and without that everything else seemed so mundane and penny-ante. No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters.”

“Well, he wouldn't get fooled again. He wouldn't give anybody the chance. Quentin felt a new attitude of detachment descend on him. His molten anger and grief were cooling into a glossy protective coating, a hard transparent lacquer of uncaring. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything.”

“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.”

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