Gregory Maguire Quotes

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?

This is why you shouldn't fall in love, it blinds you. Love is wicked distraction.

The storm dropped a house on her head.

While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon.

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

I actually prefer female voices to listen to, mostly, but among the male singers whose voices I like are Jeff Buckley, Art Garfunkel, that sort of voice. Contemporary crooners rather than rockers.

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

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.

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.

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

It's unbecoming," she agreed. "A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.

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.

Her sister's shoes. They sparkeled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkeled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood and thorny stars.

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.

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.

His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.

So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.

I don't like work like that. I am the silent partner. I work through events, I live on the sidelines, I dabble in causes and effects, I watch how the misbegotten creatures of this world live their lives.

I shall pray for your soul,' promised Nessarose. I shall wait for your shoes,' Elphie answered.

The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness.

The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.

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

...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.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

One plus one equals both.

The answer of course, is that the clock isn't meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.

The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.

Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow.

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

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.

She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go.

Happy endings are still endings.

Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life.

...I dabble in causes and effects.

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

Forgive us our trespasses," says Margarethe, "and get out of our way.

I learned to fly on a broom," he said, rolling up his sleeves. "I can learn to milk a goat, I bet." Though flying on a broom proved to be the easier task, he found.

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 specifically you harvest- the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).

Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.

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

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.

I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.

Everyone dies. It's a question of where and how, that's all.

They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.

Only he with the hobbled foot fully knows the beauty of running. Only he with the severed ear can apprehend what the sweetest music must sound like. Our ailments complete us.

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.

In the end, all disguises must drop.

If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.