Lev Grossman

But Eliot missed Quentin. He wanted Quentin by his side. For all his faults Quentin had been his best friend here, and really he’d just been coming into his own. That last adventure had been good for him. It had worn away the last of his adolescent self-consciousness, letting his better nature—his curiosity, his intelligence, his fanatical loyalty, his wounded heart—show through.

Fillory wasn’t the same without him. Nobody loved Fillory the way Quentin did, not even its High King. Nobody understood it like he did. Nobody enjoyed it like he did, and nobody could troubleshoot it like him when things went south.

They charged on and up into white cloud, and Fillory vanished. Clouds in Fillory weren’t clammy and disappointing the way they were in the real world, they brushed past you all warm and soft and cottony, just solid enough to be comforting. Fuck love, fuck marriage, fuck children, fuck fucking itself: this was his romance, this fantasy land at whose helm he sat, steering it on and on into the future, world without end, until he died and tastefully idealized statues were made of him. It was all he needed. It was all he would ever need.

Drinks were a lot like books, really: it didn’t matter where you were, the contents of a vodka tonic were always more or less the same, and you could count on them to take you away to somewhere better or at least make your present arrangements seem more manageable.