The Magician King

He felt like he was coming back to life too. Not that he's been dead, just... not quite alive. Something else.

- Gods. I want to find out more about them.

• That's insane. There's no such thing as gods. Or God. You know, Pouncy, one of the things I love about the fact that I didn't go to college is that I didn't have to sit around a freshmen dorm getting high and arguing about shit like that.

-Why do you always try to ruin everything?
-I'm not ruining it. I just want to understand it.
-If you had faith you wouldn't have to understand.

He'd been free his whole life, if only he'd known it.

Supposedly Thames dragon wrote mostly of Pink Floyd stuff. At least after Syd Barett left.

She was into the real world. She was into fieldwork. Specifically she was into dragons. Quentin supposed it was an extension of the general Australian preoccupation with fatally dangerous animals. Start with saltwater crocodiles and box jellyfish and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump up the food chain before you got to dragons.

— Будьте осторожны с моей наукой, — предупредил Бингл. — То, что начертано мечом, не подлежит исправлению.
— Я тебя для того и взял на службу, чтобы ничего не чертить самому.
— Иногда мне кажется, что я — меч судьбы. И она обращается со мной очень круто.

У нас в Ордене это называется инверсией глубины. Чем больше углубляешься в космические тайны, тем неинтереснее они делаются.

Есть вещи, которые должен делать человек, а не бог. Тот, кто исполняет предназначение, не просто находит что-то — он становится кем-то другим.

«Они мертвы, и я их некролог».

За двойную жизнь подпольного мага приходилось платить всегда. Твой магический двойник не оставлял тебя ни на минуту, тянул за рукав, нашептывал, что реальная твоя жизнь — фальшивка, примитивная отмазка, в которую все равно никто не верит по-настоящему.

мрак – еще полбеды. В него можно укутаться, как в черный бархат, и спать, а отчаяние лишено цвета. Оно как разница между нулем и пустым множеством, не содержащим даже нуля

Слов сказано не было, но Джулия поняла, что мать частично умерла в это утро. И не предприняла героических мер, чтобы вернуть ее к жизни.

Того, кто застревает между порталами, рано или поздно съедают тролли.

Кое-что иногда можно исправить даже долгое время спустя.

Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn’t doing it.

Technically the process is called ascension, or sometimes assumption, or my favorite word for it is translation. They all mean the same thing: the process by which a human being is brought bodily into heaven, without dying, and accorded some measure of divine status.

Becoming invisible was a simple idea in theory, but in practice it was a lot harder than you’d think. It had been done, but it took years of meticulous self-erasure, and once accomplished it was practically impossible to undo; apart from anything else you could never be sure you’d reinstated your visible self completely accurately.

Worlds worlds worlds.