“Like wine, Provençal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. It concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief.”

“By the standards of magical society they’d fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn’t had the basic good sense to keep their shit to themselves.”

“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.”

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

“Both their attention and their neglect were equally intolerable. His world had become complicated and interesting and magical. Theirs was mundane and domestic. They didn't understand that the world they could see wasn't the one that mattered, and they never would.”

“You cannot study magic. You cannot learn it. You must ingest it. Digest it. You must merge with it. And it with you.”

“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.”