“But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray suit, Quentin knew he wasn’t happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come.”

Quentin is walking with James and Julia; both of the male characters are on their way to their respective college interviews. Quentin has done what people are expected to do to be happy, yet despite his efforts he is not been able to find happiness. This will be a common inability for Quentin throughout the novel. 

“This is impossible, he thought lucidly; he thought the words in his mind, but they got no purchase on the world around him. He felt like he was having a not-unpleasant drug experience. The tiles were intricately carved with a pattern of twiny vines, or possibly elaborately calligraphic words that had been worn away into illegibility. Little notes and seeds drifted around in the sunlight. If this is a hallucination, he thought it’s pretty damn hi-res.” 

Quentin has found his way into Brakebills. Though it is November, it is summer weather on campus. Eliot has just taken him through the maze and across the great expanse of lush green grass. In the quote, Quentin is responding to what he sees. To Quentin it seems impossible to be real. This quote illustrates the flipside of the banality Quentin encounters in the real world; his first moments at Brakebills seem to align with what he’d hoped to find in the Fillory books, when he was younger. 

“In Brooklyn reality had been empty and meaningless—whatever inferior stuff it was made of, meaning had refused to adhere to it. Brakebills was different. It mattered. Meaning—is that what magic was?—was everywhere here.”

Quentin is now studying magic at Brakebills, and he is contrasting the world of magic with the outside world. To Quentin, the world of his parents and the world he grew up in just doesn’t measure up in comparison to what he is experiencing at Brakebills. Quentin doesn’t turn to Brakebills solely for escape; rather, he turns to the fantastic in order to give his life meaning.