You're saying the gods don't have free will." "The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals
Lev GrossmanI think for a long time, I was paralyzed by some of my hopes and ideals for what my life was going to be like. I had this perfect vision of how my life should go, but it seemed - it was - impossible to realize, so I sat around for a long, long time doing almost nothing at all.
Lev GrossmanA big silvery janitor. Penny, this canโt be how the universe works.โ โIn the Order we call it โinverse profundity.โ Weโve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.
Lev GrossmanIn our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.
Lev GrossmanI'm now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, "There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres." I'm much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it's doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that.
Lev Grossman