Gregory Maguire Quotes

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

In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.

Glinda waved dismissively. Then she tucked her hand against her mouth and bit her knuckles. It was hard to tell if her pretty ways were studied or innate. "Oh, oh," she managed, "I don't know that I'll see you again- and you remind me so of her.

And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

O beautiful, to make escapeAnd leave this world behind.Had I to stay another dayI'd lose my fucking mind!

There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.

Brrr, who had never admired books particularly...didn't remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met

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.

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.

To the grim poor there need be no pourquoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her--is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil...?

In the end, all disguises must drop.

I have always felt like a pawn... My skin color's been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life's work of my own, I haven't found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that.

Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page – but then the world is the same way, isn’t it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.

To grow a melody?" "You can't grow a melody on purpose,” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental.

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.

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

And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations.

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

At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change.

Don’t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it’s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing.

This is what fun is like," said Rain, almost to herself.

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.

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.

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

People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

Night is brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.

One never knows how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her — is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is the very least question of definitions.

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 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.

Nothing in the Grimmerie on how to depose a tyrant - nothing useful... Nothing there that described why men and women could turn out so horrible. Or so wonderful - if that ever happens anymore.