120 Quotes & Sayings By Gregory Maguire

Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing -- by dint of ignorance and innocence -- that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way. Gregory Maguire

One never knows how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her – is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is the very least question of definitions. Gregory Maguire

Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they've imagined us. Gregory Maguire

I care as much as I can, but I don’t spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve. Gregory Maguire

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character. Gregory Maguire

(from the short story The Honorary Shepherds)...you can't be kicked out of a faith. Faith starts inside your heart and ends up in eternity. All you can be kicked out of is a building, which is the bus stop of faith, sort of, and what's a building? Gregory Maguire

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome. Gregory Maguire

You could say that Elphaba brought us together, ' said Boq softly. 'I'm closer to her and so I'm closer to you.' Galinda seemed to give up. She leaned her head back on the velvet cushions of the swing and said, 'Boq, you know despite myself I think you're a little sweet. You're a little sweet and you're a little charming and you're a little maddening and you're a little habit-forming.' Boq held his breath. But you're little! ' she concluded. 'You're a Munchkin, for god's sake! ' He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little. Gregory Maguire

Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away. Gregory Maguire

Brrr, who had never admired books particularly...didn't remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe. Gregory Maguire

Night-time is being brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away. Gregory Maguire

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward. Gregory Maguire

Don’t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it’s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing. Gregory Maguire

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history. Gregory Maguire

Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history Gregory Maguire

Your childhood, " said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind. Gregory Maguire

The real thing about evil… you figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret. Gregory Maguire

The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace. Gregory Maguire

For who was in thrall to whom, really? And could it ever be known? Each agent working in collusion and antagonism - like the cold and the sun alike creating a deadly spear of ice... Who is in thrall to whom? And while you wait to learn, the deadly icicle, formed by all opposing forces, falls and drives its cold nail into penetrable flesh. Gregory Maguire

To grow a melody?" "You can't grow a melody on purpose, ” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental. Gregory Maguire

There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence. Gregory Maguire

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is. Gregory Maguire

What had survived - maybe all that had survived of Trism - was Liir's sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression - unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir's heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism's glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing. Gregory Maguire

Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much. Gregory Maguire

Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It's so much like home, and then it holds out on you. Gregory Maguire

Come what may and hell to pay. Gregory Maguire

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence. Gregory Maguire

The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious. Gregory Maguire

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase. Gregory Maguire

It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself? Gregory Maguire

She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn't smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It's something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experience the long-held suspicion of our species, that the enchanted world of childhood is merely a mask for something else, a more subtle and paradoxical magic.- p. 157 . Gregory Maguire

Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear yet... She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart. But there was more than one way to be smart. Gregory Maguire

What will I do if I find myself with a heart?" "Lose it constantly, I imagine. Gregory Maguire

He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others. Gregory Maguire

I have always felt like a pawn... My skin color's been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life's work of my own, I haven't found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that. Gregory Maguire

Don’t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it’s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing. Gregory Maguire

But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off. Gregory Maguire

I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read. Gregory Maguire

A world emerging, daily, out of nothing, a world that we trust to resemble what we've seen previously. We should know better. Gregory Maguire

Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind. Gregory Maguire

Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~ Candle Gregory Maguire

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone. Gregory Maguire

What is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it. Gregory Maguire

If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it. Gregory Maguire

At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change. Gregory Maguire

The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory. Gregory Maguire

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's. Gregory Maguire

Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met Gregory Maguire

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls... Gregory Maguire

Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page — but then the world is the same way, isn’t it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition. . Gregory Maguire

What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get — the more specificity you harvest — the more precious becomes every ounce and spam. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret). . Gregory Maguire

People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of. Gregory Maguire

And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no "after", in the "ever after" of a Witch there is no "happily"; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is-alas, or perhaps thank mercy-no telling. She was dead, dead, and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice. Gregory Maguire

The real thing about evil, " said the Witch at the doorway, "isn't any of what you said. You figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It's like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret. Gregory Maguire

Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal. Gregory Maguire

It isn't hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow. Gregory Maguire

It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow. Gregory Maguire

One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her- is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? Gregory Maguire

One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her - is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions. Gregory Maguire

A notion of character, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives. They woke up, were they lucky enough to have consciousness, in the act of doing something they already knew how to do: feeding themselves with currants. Walking the dog. Knotting up a broken bootlace. Singing antiphonally in the choir. Suddenly: This is I, I am the girl singing this alto line off-key, I am the boy loping after the dog, and I can see myself doing it as, presumably, the dog cannot see itself. How peculiar! I lift on my toes at the end of the dock, to dive into the lake because I am hot, and while isolated like a specimen in the glassy slide of summer, the notions of hot and lake and I converge into a consciousness of consciousness—in an instant, in between launch and landing, even before I cannonball into the lake, shattering both my reflection and my old notion of myself. . Gregory Maguire

Glinda waved dismissively. Then she tucked her hand against her mouth and bit her knuckles. It was hard to tell if her pretty ways were studied or innate. "Oh, oh, " she managed, "I don't know that I'll see you again- and you remind me so of her. Gregory Maguire

Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on - or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense Gregory Maguire

The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man. Gregory Maguire

I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral, " said the Wizard. "In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical. Gregory Maguire

To the grim poor there need be no pourquoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her--is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil...? Gregory Maguire

As the first hard drops of rain fell, the Witch caught sight, not of the girl's face, but of the shoes. Her sister's shoes. They sparkled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood, and thorny stars. Gregory Maguire

They'd never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they'd been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love. Gregory Maguire

Oh, mercy, there is nothing monstrously ugly about you. Ruth may be unpleasing, but you are merely plain. If anything, it's my beauty that's monstrous, for it sweeps away any other aspect of my character. Gregory Maguire

And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations. Gregory Maguire

You leave home, I have learned, counting the trip day by day. If you ever get to return, you count the trip miracle by miracle. Gregory Maguire

Do good though, will you?" She blinked brightly at the green girl. "If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me? Gregory Maguire

The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again. Everything was not merely relative, it was--how to put it? --relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both. Gregory Maguire

Was it an accident... or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew? Gregory Maguire

Everyone has a right to love the land that gave them the things they need to live. It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think... that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to allow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful too. Gregory Maguire

Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents. Gregory Maguire

When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it. Gregory Maguire

By so giving up, of course, it renews itself- that is the secret Gregory Maguire

Isn't that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger-- Gregory Maguire

I hate New Year's Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven't yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn't matter. Gregory Maguire

Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face. Gregory Maguire

We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Gregory Maguire

We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Gregory Maguire

Night is brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away. Gregory Maguire

Do you expect to learn anything at Shiz?” he asked. “I have already learned not to speak to strangers.” “Then I will introduce myself and we will be strangers no longer. I am Dillamond.” “I am disinclined to know you. Gregory Maguire

Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval! Gregory Maguire

You need my help? What for? Bread, cash, a fake identity to help you slip sideways through the cracks? Tell me what you need, tell me why I should help, and I'll see what I can do. In memory of Elphaba. You knew her." Her head titled again, but up, this time, and it was to keep the sudden wetness from spilling into her carefully colored false eyelashes. "You knew my Elphie! Gregory Maguire

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough. Gregory Maguire

Her head had turned quickly away... Not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence. Gregory Maguire