Magic comes from pain

-Lev Grossman (x)

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The struggles never go away, but I think the way that [Quentin] responds to stimulus has shifted, especially after a lot of the experiences last year, last season. When you think about it, he sort of has the emotional wisdom of someone who’s like 120-something years old after having experienced like, a whole life where he fell in love with a woman and a man, and had a child, and lost his wife, and lost his best friend and soulmate, and saved the world, and maybe ruined the world. He’s experienced a lot. And so, I guess I don’t think those things go away, but I think that we’ll see a shift in the way he responds to his internal demons.

He’d been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring-a moving oasis. He wasn’t desolate, and he wasn’t empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it that’s what being a magician was. They weren’t ordinary feelings–they weren’t the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.