Gregory Maguire Quotes

The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.

I hate New Year's Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven't yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn't matter.

So she listened hard. And she began to evolve, because stories work their magic that way. They build conviction and erode conviction in equal measure.

I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.

Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

You confuse not speaking with not listening.

That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness-and life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same.

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls.

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

The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.

Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.

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.

If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.

Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly.

But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him "Yero, my hero," and that melted his heart.

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

She's sent the crows out to blind the guests coming for dinner!" What?" She's BLINDING THE GUESTS COMING FOR DINNER!" Well, that's one way to avoid having to dust, I suppose.

Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless youre 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.

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.

Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate," said Elphaba. "See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something?

A capacity for inferiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation by squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hallowness. The syndrom especially plaques anyone who lives behind a mask. An elephant in her disquise as a human princess, a scarecrow with painted features, a glittering tiara under which to glow and glide in anonymous glamour. A witch's hat, a wizards stole, a scholars gown, a soldiers dress sartorials. A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I nkow what I know.

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.

Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!

I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.

Oh now that's a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future

It's the work that's important, not the individual who does it.

A man is called a traitor, or liberator. A rich man is a thief or philanthropist. Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It's all in which label is able to persist.

I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I’d rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.

We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn’t as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness

I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.

The story of Mirror Mirror is in many ways a story about evolution. Its about the evolution of a child into an adult. Its about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. Its about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.

Always the bridesmaid , never the bride." Always the godfather, never the god".

...perhaps charity is the kind of beauty that we comprehend the best because we miss it the most.

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.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.

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

I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.

To consider what other people might say is hardly a good reason to take action or to defer it. You have your own life to live, Iris, and at its end, the only opinion that amounts to anything is that which God bestows

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.

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

Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.

...and he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, little by little by little.

However in the world did her skin come green?" Nanny wondered, stupidly, for Melena blanched and Frex reddened, and the baby held her breath as if trying to turn blue to please them all. Nanny had to slap her to make her breath again.

Some said the original evil was the vacuum caused by the Fairy Queen Lurline leaving us alone here. When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil and maybe slpits apart and multiplies. So every evil thing is a sign of the absence of deity

The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar.

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

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.