I should be happy, Quentin thought. I’m young and alive and healthy.
-- Narrator (Book I, Brooklyn paragraph 23)

Importance: From the very beginning of the novel, Quentin is unhappy with his life. Though he has everything going for him, he feels incomplete. He is not sure why, but it is a growing hollow inside of him that will eventually take control of him, and eventually lead him to make stupid decisions later in the novel in the attempt to escape himself.

Like most people Quentin read the Fillory books in grade school. Unlike most people – unlike James and Julia – he never got over them.
-- Narrator (Book I, Brooklyn paragraph 35)

Importance: Here, the narrator explains what will become a central point to the novel’s plot later on. Quentin is a huge fan of the Fillory set of novels – about a land of fantasy and magic visited and changed by wartime English children in the later 1910s. The novels still captivate Quentin – and...