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

Such silly things, children -- and so embarrassing -- because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

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.

Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn't rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled,...it is Art.

[Puggles] "What population signs on willingly for slavery?" "You mean other than wives?" [Glinda]

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

I do love to sing. Had I a longer set of thigh bones and a sweeter voice, I should have loved to be a performer.