Quotes From "Out Of Oz" By Gregory Maguire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't wish, "said Rain, "don't start. Wishing only... Gregory Maguire

This is what fun is like, " said Rain, almost to herself. Gregory Maguire

Well, I learned to cook. At my age, " she told him. "What's next? Art therapy? Anyway, I've had quite a time of it this summer, and who knows what eases down on any road. Come, Rain. A quick goodbye, and off you go." "Goodbye, " said Rain to the Lion, and then to the woman. "Not to them, " said Glinda, "To me." She turned eyes that were saucerly upon Glinda. "Mum? Gregory Maguire

It’s been a long, rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness. Gregory Maguire