Quotes / Longing for Fictionland

But there was a more seductive, more dangerous truth to Fillory that Quentin couldn't let go. It was almost like the Fillory books — especially the first one, The World in the Walls — were about reading itself. When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt's house and slips through into Fillory (Quentin always pictured him awkwardly pushing aside the pendulum, like the uvula of a monstrous throat), it's like he's opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.

The world Martin discovers in the walls of his aunt's house is a world of magical twilight, a landscape as black and white and stark as a printed page, with prickly stubblefields and rolling hills crisscrossed by old stone walls. In Fillory there's an eclipse every day at noon, and seasons can last for a hundred years. Bare trees scratch at the sky. Pale green seas lap at narrow white beaches made of broken shells. In Fillory things mattered in a way they didn't in this world. In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.

— The Magicians

I wanna live in the world of a video game
I wanna see my face on the Anime screen
Get away from the 2-bit more of the same
Gonna make it something more than a dream

— L33tStr33t Boys, "Otaku Anthem (I Wanna Live)"

Some day I'll wish upon a star,
And wake up somewhere very far,
A land I had only heard about before...
And the first thing that I'm gonna do,
Is search right across that land for you,
Because you are the pony I adore,
And I swear I'll love you forever-more.

— Forest Rain, "Hay Ms Derpy"