Gregory Maguire Quotes & Sayings

But he found himself rounding syllables like stones in his mouth, silently. He knew he was shy, and thought to be stupid; he was beginning to suspect, thought, that he wasn't stupid. Perhaps not even slow. Merely uneducated. But not, he hoped, uneducable. — Gregory Maguire

But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before. — 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

I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all. — Gregory Maguire

That's the beginning of heroism, the decision to try. — Gregory Maguire

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings. — Gregory Maguire

There is no backstory in dream. Time slips all its handcuffs. So: — Gregory Maguire

We all have our shortcomings, it seems, though some are less visible than others. — Gregory Maguire

He lingered at the door, and said, 'The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you want?' ...
She couldn't say forgiveness, not to Liir. She started to say 'a soldier,' to make fun of his mooning affections over the guys in uniform. But realizing even as she said it that he would be hurt, she caught herself halfway, and in the end what came out of her mouth surprised them both.
She said, 'A soul-'
He blinked at her. — Gregory Maguire

Why lock yourself in your own cage when someone is handing you a key? — 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

The boy does well enough," said Vicente. "A goose does not ask much of life, after all."
"No," she admitted. "Those who ask much are more likely disappointed. We should all be as simple as the goose. — Gregory Maguire

Elphaba's already come back. I saw her last week on the stairs. — Gregory Maguire

The world was floods above and fire below — Gregory Maguire

The eye is always drawn to light, but shadows have more to say. — Gregory Maguire

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

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother? — Gregory Maguire

The colossal might of wickedness: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime. — Gregory Maguire

He was hungry without yet knowing that hunger could be slaked by food; he was lonely without yet knowing that loneliness could be slaked, too. — Gregory Maguire

The wind was picking up, and the Scarecrow shivered. — Gregory Maguire

But men don't dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the death. Ah, we're slow learners, Nanny countered. But they can't learn at all. — Gregory Maguire

Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don't forget we loved it when we were alive. — Gregory Maguire

Before you save anyone else, you have to save yourself. otherwise, you'rejust a bundle of tics, a stringed puppet manipulated by the chance and the insensible wind. — Gregory Maguire

There is a limit to the nonsense even a dream can attempt. — Gregory Maguire

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

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

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

Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn't ironic in the end. — Gregory Maguire

You can't be said to have properly established yourself in a place until you have been seen there. — Gregory Maguire

Begging your pardon, sir ... One population can't make peace with another by force. — Gregory Maguire

One doesn't know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one's life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime. — 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

The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. . . . — Gregory Maguire

History crawls along on the peg legs of small individual lives," said Frex, "and at the same time larger eternal forces converge. You can't attend to both arenas at once." "Our child may not have a small life. — Gregory Maguire

Even God used silence as a strategy. — Gregory Maguire

Not everyone can fly by bubble ! — Gregory Maguire

Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through. — Gregory Maguire

No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not. — Gregory Maguire

We can't leave just like that." Cat was appalled. "Where can we find you if we need you again?"
[Baba Yaga] "You can't. Listen, Little Drear, I hate saying good-byes. I have a good strategy for avoiding them."
"What's that?" asked Anton.
"I eat my guests. — Gregory Maguire

You lost your copper as well as your faith in wishes, and prayers. — 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

Stinging words! You re critical of everyone," observes Iris. "Oh, not everyone," says Clara in an offhand manner. "Only everybody who's alive as well as most people who are dead. I feel quite neutral about anybody not yet born. — Gregory Maguire

I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can. — Gregory Maguire

There was much to hate in this world and too much to love. — 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

Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [ ... ] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home. — Gregory Maguire

Everybody needs to grow up and leave home sometimes. But sometimes home doesn't like it. — Gregory Maguire

Elena had always felt like the center of her own world - who doesn't? The world arranged itself around her like petals around the stem of a flower. This way the meadows, that way the woodland. Over here, the baryn's estate, out there, the hills that hug the known world close and imply a world at beyond. She could never come up with the edge of a world, because it always kept going on beyond. She moved the center of the world as she walked. The world was balanced on her head. — Gregory Maguire

She was a sour-sass soul with a rubbery face. — Gregory Maguire

Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling porcupine," she crooned. "Little critters fried like fritters come out crunchy and divine. — Gregory Maguire

The mister days that letters are the key, but even when you know the whole family, there's so many combinations you can make. And they break their word. — Gregory Maguire

And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done. — Gregory Maguire

I rarely trust myself to make statements about truth. — Gregory Maguire

Perplexity isn't as noble as conviction, but perhaps more good is done in the name of muddling through uncertainty than is done hacking away with the righteous sword of self-confidence. — Gregory Maguire

Frex had a notion that she wasn't sorry to see him go off from time to time, so that she could be glad to see him come back. — Gregory Maguire

Alice less winsome than weird, and treated Lydia like a Cerberus, — Gregory Maguire

She added, perhaps to herself, "You have to become old and ugly before anyone listens to you, and then they don't, because you're ugly and old. — Gregory Maguire

Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree? — Gregory Maguire

How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception. — Gregory Maguire

O beautiful, to make escape
And leave this world behind.
Had I to stay another day
I'd lose my fucking mind... — Gregory Maguire

I know Oz, now," she said, and in the carving of the lintel she found that common ideogram, a Z circled with an O. "Usually letters don't hide inside each other," she told Glinda firmly. "No, that's true. In Oz, I suppose, something is always hiding ... — Gregory Maguire

I'm not a writer because I want to make money. I'm a writer because I'm a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories. — 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

Come what may and hell to pay. — Gregory Maguire

She found her regard for Mr. Winter turning to something like suspicion - though notice how often we lower suspicion upon others to avoid putting ourselves under scrutiny. Now — 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

It's hard to find evil in this world,' said the Witch. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow. — Gregory Maguire

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments. — Gregory Maguire

One should see the world, and see himself, as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed, the scale is tipped to the good - he and the world are saved. When he does one evil deed, the scale is tipped to the bad - he and the world are destroyed.'" "Interesting. Who said that, your grandmother?" "Maimonides. The great Jewish scholastic." "I didn't know you read Jewish philosophers." "It is said, 'You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.'" "And who said that?" "Also Maimonides. — Gregory Maguire

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves as well. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen accidents, meetings and material assistance that no one could have dreamed would come their way. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. - Goethe, by attribution — Gregory Maguire

Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing.
If one could drown in the grass ... it might be the best way to die. — Gregory Maguire

history takes a long time to happen. — Gregory Maguire

Noon bells sang out with their usual ignorance of mood, marking out moments of grief and worry, elation and confusion. The bells said that at its core, human life was fundamentally a sort of organic clockwork, while the winds and skylarks that swept against the sound of metronomic iron timekeeping argued for variety, subtlety, epiphany. — Gregory Maguire

The family was still hard-pressed for money, and dreamed of savory treats to eat, but they had the warmth of one another, and enough on which to live, and in most parts of the world that is called plenty. — Gregory Maguire

If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, that might be the best way to die. — Gregory Maguire

What the hell are you doing up there?'
So he slipped, of course, because he was startled, and because fate, having been so kind to him as to award him this ecstasy, retributively was going to kill him now. He lost his footing and grabbed for the chimney but missed. Head over thighs he rolled out like a child's toy, smashed into the poking branches of the damn pear tree, which probably saved his life, breaking his fall. He landed with a thud on a bed of lettuces, and the wind was knocked out of him, mortifyingly so, through all available orifices.
Oh, brilliant,' said the voice. 'The trees are dropping their fruits early this year. — Gregory Maguire

It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement. — Gregory Maguire

Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless you're really depressed or something, the person in the mirror generally looks a little more competent, a little more curious, a little more intelligent than you actually feel yourself to be? They often look more interesting and more soulful. — Gregory Maguire

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

They had ganged up on her, in the claustrophobic, loving way of families, and she wanted no more of it. — Gregory Maguire

A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him -so why bother?- but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible. — Gregory Maguire

... but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn't hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin. — Gregory Maguire

...I dabble in causes and effects. — Gregory Maguire

In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified. — Gregory Maguire

It's the only condition I know. Bitter Love, Loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new. — Gregory Maguire

All these last months he had begun to talk about Sarima and the family as if they were ghosts, hiding just around the curve of the spiral staircase in the tower, suppressing giggles at this long, long game of hide-and-seek. — Gregory Maguire

She looked as if she'd swallowed an assortment of her own hangnails. — Gregory Maguire

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

Sorrow has a name, and its name is loneliness. Sorrow has a shape, and its shape is absence. Sorrow is a sickness like any other. — 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

She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands-as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her own way. — Gregory Maguire

To look into the mirror is to see the future, in blood and rubies. — Gregory Maguire

Aren't these the finest treasures? Each one springs up, and becomes more red than rubies, more fine than diamonds adn more valuable, so we are told; and before you can run back here again to look, the petals have begin to drop and the leaves to yellow. Look, they sag, they fall. Are they the more wonderful because they live such a short time. — 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

Sometimes I think that vengeance is habit forming too. A stiffness of the attitude. — Gregory Maguire

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

How could anyone live without flying? — Gregory Maguire

I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch. — Gregory Maguire

Quoting reminds me there are other people in the world besides only me. And other thoughts besides mine, and other ways of thinking. — 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