“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.”

“[F]or 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.”

“His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.”

“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”

“Sure, but real life’s not actually like that,” Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. “You don’t just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You’re not going to be a character in a story, there’s nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn’t work like that.”

“Sometimes you just have to do things, Quentin,” Julia said, as he climbed on board after her. “You spend too much of your time waiting.”

“If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.”