Gregory Maguire Quotes

My first job was scooping ice cream at Friendly's in Albany, New York. I hated the work, most of my colleagues, and the uniform, and I more or less lost my taste for ice cream permanently.

I like to think Im a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions.

It's the endlessly thinking about yourself that causes such heart shame.

Okay let's get this over with, no I'm not seasick, yes I've always been green, No I didn't eat grass as a child.

And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the side stepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever.

She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she.

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.

It was deliciously pagan.

...No opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.

It’s the place of the story, beginning here, in the meadow of late summer flowers, thriving before the Atlantic storms drive wet and winter upon them all.

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

We are loping sequences of chemical conversions, acting ourselves converted. We are twists of genes acting ourselves twisted; we are wicks of burning neuroses acting ourselves wicked. And nothing to be done about it. And nothing to be done about it.

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.

Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.

The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build.

He knew about being alone. The weather was always cold there.

What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.

Of course. You get everything from books.

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.

The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

Just follow that one road the whole time!... I hope they don't get lost, I'm so bad at giving directions.

There may be no city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.

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.

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

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.

Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.

Notice, notice; let noticing take the place of screaming.

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.

The truth isn't a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on.

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

Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met

The world was floods above and fire below

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.

My job is to protect you, Lady Glinda even if you are loosing your mind.

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

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

That's all I want- to do no harm.

Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. Beautiful in the concept, if we're lucky, but frequently tedious or regrettable as we flesh ourselves out.

She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.

Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven. So you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.

As long as people are going to call you lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

There were more ways to live than the ones given by one's superiors

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

In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.

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

Old Flossie settle down on the other side of What-the-Dickens and dragged some handiwork out of a sack. She armed herself with two thorns shaped into knitting needles. A wodge of curlicued metallic scrubbing pad supplied the threat. 'I knit handcuffs as a hobby,' explained Old Flossie happily, and set to work. 'Idle hands get up to no good, so I like to be prepared in case I meet up with any idle hands.

It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however, that shortly thereafter, the Wizard absconded from the Palace. He left in the way he had first arrived-- a hot-air balloon-- just a few hours before seditious ministers were to lead a Palace revolt and to hold an execution without trial.

Are you the dart?" he said. "Are you the knife? The fuse?" She said (though he wasn't convinced): "My deane, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad.