Lev Grossman

Here was somebody who was having a good time. He was doing what he wanted and enjoying himself. He’d been through everything Quentin had been through: he lost the girl he loved, and he nearly died. He didn’t sit around moaning and philosophizing about it. He bounced back and set himself up in a palazzo.

“You wish to be a hero, but you do not know what a hero is. You think a hero is one who wins. But a hero must be prepared to lose, Quentin. Are you? Are you prepared to lose everything?”

She couldn’t go back, she knew that now. The magic kingdom was closed to her. But some days she couldn’t see a way forward either.

She wasn’t demented—she wasn’t!—it was just a game she played with herself. It was a little insane, but hey, whatever got you through, right?

She knew she was obsessed, but it was turning out that she was the kind of person who needed to be obsessed with something, and she could have done a lot worse. God knows she had before.

They’d been so young and innocent and hopeful, and they’d found something more wonderful than they could ever have hoped for, and it had destroyed them.

So what if he wasn’t a king. It had been lovely for a while, but here was real life, and he would make the most of it like everybody else. What kind of a hero was he, if he couldn’t do that?

Only Julia picked at her food, managing a bite every few minutes, like her body was an unloved pet that she was being forced to babysit.

He thought he’d learned a lesson about the world, and now he was realizing that the lesson he learned might have been the wrong one. The right adventure had been offered to him, and he’d walked away. If being a hero is a matter of knowing your cues, like the fairy tale said, he’d missed his. Instead he’d spent three days faffing around on Earth for nothing, and nearly got stuck there forever, while Eliot was off on a real quest.

Eliot had no idea where he was going, but he’d read enough to know that a state of relative ignorance wasn’t necessarily a handicap on a quest. It was something your dauntless questing knight accepted and embraced. You lit out into the wilderness at random, and if your state of mind, or maybe it was your soul, was correct, then adventure would find you through the natural course of events. It was like free association—there were no wrong answers. It worked as long as you weren’t trying too hard.