Top 100 Gregory Maguire Quotes
#1. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#2. Everyone dies. It's a question of where and how, that's all.
Gregory Maguire
#3. We are the next thing the Time Dragon is dreaming, and nothing to be done about it.
Gregory Maguire
#4. When a scarecrow blows apart in a gale wind, the farmer just props up another one. It's the job to be done that's important, not who does it.
Gregory Maguire
#5. Everybody needs to grow up and leave home sometimes. But sometimes home doesn't like it.
Gregory Maguire
#6. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#7. What is a spell after all but a way of coaxing syllables together so persuasively that some new word is spelled ... some imprecision clarified, some name Named ... and some change managed.
Gregory Maguire
#8. Those who are roped into bed at night often fall into delusions of flight.
Gregory Maguire
#9. Immortality is a chancy thing; it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is.
Gregory Maguire
#10. My job is to protect you, Lady Glinda even if you are loosing your mind.
Gregory Maguire
#11. He shook his ladle overhead as if summoning the wrath of angel chefs among the stars.
Gregory Maguire
#12. I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope.
They say I did, at least, and so does he.
And who am I to make of the Pope a liar,
And who is he to make a liar of me?
Gregory Maguire
#14. No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.
Gregory Maguire
#15. Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met
Gregory Maguire
#17. Looking at him makes her feel like laughing all over - as if she could laugh not just with her mouth but with her eyes, her heart, her very limbs.
Gregory Maguire
#18. Noon is a disguise of whiteness put on by the eternal Night behind it.
Gregory Maguire
#19. Boq sat down, and shook his head, as if bewildered by the apparition of Elphaba.
Gregory Maguire
#20. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#21. [Cat] found a complete set of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, with little tabs of paper sticking out. The were scrawled over with the witch's comments to herself, "Fun!" "Try this, but with exploding feathers!" and "Gotta love him
deeply sick.
Gregory Maguire
#22. I have so few choices, really, if I can't get myself back home. Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go out far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realize that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything.
Gregory Maguire
#23. There's no need to hear gossip about government. It'll only give you gas.
Gregory Maguire
#24. I do not deny that you overwhelm me with your beauty. You are the moon in the season of shadow light; you are the fruit of the candlewood tree; you are the phoenix in circles of flight
.
Gregory Maguire
#25. You lost your copper as well as your faith in wishes, and prayers.
Gregory Maguire
#26. What good is it being a painter if you can't paint yourself?
Gregory Maguire
#27. The reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.
Gregory Maguire
#28. I know Oz, now," she said, and in the carving of the lintel she found that common ideogram, a Z circled with an O. "Usually letters don't hide inside each other," she told Glinda firmly. "No, that's true. In Oz, I suppose, something is always hiding ...
Gregory Maguire
#29. I'm a priest, I know better than most when a lie is permitted.
Gregory Maguire
#30. The wall read:
ELPHIE LIVES
OZMA LIVES
THE WIZARD LIVES
and then
EVERYONE LIVES BUT US.
Gregory Maguire
#31. If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.
Gregory Maguire
#33. Why lock yourself in your own cage when someone is handing you a key?
Gregory Maguire
#34. I write because I admire the act of rationalization, of seeking clarity in one's understanding of the complexities of life, and I'm bad at it. I'm slow. Writing, which is an arduous and slow process, proceeds at the same rate as my sloth-like mind.
Gregory Maguire
#36. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.
Gregory Maguire
#37. I hate to be obvious," added the Scarecrow, "but you'd have saved yourself a heap of trouble if you weren't too cheap to invest in a leash, Dorothy.
Gregory Maguire
#38. The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.
Gregory Maguire
#39. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#41. The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness.
Gregory Maguire
#42. I'm not involved in shame. Morals are learned in childhood, and I didn't have any such holiday called childhood.
Gregory Maguire
#43. Think of egg and spoon. If there is an egg, well, fine. You eat. Unless you use your spoon to hold the egg out of my reach. Does being in possession of a spoon give you more right to the egg?
Gregory Maguire
#44. Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on
or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offence.
Gregory Maguire
#45. No," she cried, "no, no, I'm not a harem, I'm not a woman, I'm not a person, no.
Gregory Maguire
#50. Your name is Rain, isn't it? Rain slips in the cracks and slides through the seams. You can do it? Can't you?
Gregory Maguire
#51. This girl who seemed, increasingly, to be interested in learning to read everything except how human beings talked to one another.
Gregory Maguire
#52. Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.
Gregory Maguire
#53. You're fun to look at," decided Galinda.
Boq's face fell. "Fun?" he said.
I'd give a lot to achieve fun," Elphaba said. "The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they're usually referring to digestion-
Gregory Maguire
#54. No one controls your destiny. Even at the very worst - there is always choice.
Gregory Maguire
#55. All of life hinges on what one does next, until finally one makes the wrong choice.
Gregory Maguire
#56. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#57. She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.
Gregory Maguire
#58. Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last
Gregory Maguire
#59. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet.
Gregory Maguire
#60. [after discussion about what evil is, a question asked to Elphaba on why she killed Madame Morrible]
"Why did you do it?" asked the hostess with spirit.
The Witch shrugged. "For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.
Gregory Maguire
#62. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#63. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#64. How shallow the words are, really - She is a witch. One might as well say, She is a mother, thinks Iris; that about covers the same terrain, doesn't it?
Gregory Maguire
#65. Sometimes I think that vengeance is habit forming too. A stiffness of the attitude.
Gregory Maguire
#66. An odor of June mud, backwashed with essence of meadow-grass and a whiff of cow.
Gregory Maguire
#67. Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly.
Gregory Maguire
#68. But who could teach daughters how to fly? Parents were by definition earthbound, grub eaters, feet in their own coffins, by dint of being parents.
Gregory Maguire
#69. But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don't lie about men, only women.
Gregory Maguire
#70. As for dreams, they are powered by urgent desire, even if that desire is only to escape the quotidian.
Gregory Maguire
#71. Ambition without direction is like milk without a cup.
Gregory Maguire
#72. As long as people are going to call you lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.
Gregory Maguire
#73. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#74. who knows what we want? We're all mysteries, even to ourselves.
Gregory Maguire
#75. I've told you before, I don't comprehend religion, although conviction is a concept I'm beginning to get. In any case, someone with a real religious conviction is, I propose, a religious convict, and deserves locking up.
Gregory Maguire
#76. There may be no city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.
Gregory Maguire
#77. Oh now that's a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future
Gregory Maguire
#78. At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change.
Gregory Maguire
#79. Frex had a notion that she wasn't sorry to see him go off from time to time, so that she could be glad to see him come back.
Gregory Maguire
#80. You mean you indulged in adultery and you dont' even have the benefit of a good saucy memory about it.
Gregory Maguire
#81. It's been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.
Gregory Maguire
#82. If the unlettered farmers of Munchkinland and the factory workers of Gillikin believe that their fate is being determined by how the Time Dragon dreams them up, they don't need to bother to take responsibility for their actions or for changing their class and station in life.
Gregory Maguire
#83. Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle
Gregory Maguire
#84. Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless you're 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.
Gregory Maguire
#85. The alien girl - she called herself Dorothy - was by virtue of her survival elevated to living sainthood. The dog was merely annoying.
Gregory Maguire
#86. You can't be said to have properly established yourself in a place until you have been seen there.
Gregory Maguire
#87. It was hard to tell what her weapons were, except for that sort of inane good sense and emotional honesty.
Gregory Maguire
#88. Why were memories so independent? So jealous of corroborating detail?
Gregory Maguire
#89. And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.
Gregory Maguire
#90. Age doesn't always constitute wisdom. And people grow up on different schedules, one from the next.
Gregory Maguire
#91. Happiness now sometimes meant turning away from what one remembered of earlier, better happiness.
Gregory Maguire
#92. I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.
Gregory Maguire
#94. How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.
Gregory Maguire
#95. I'm no pawn," said Glinda. "I take all the credit in the world for my own foolishness. Good gracious, dear, all of life is a spell. You know that. But you do have some choice.
Gregory Maguire
#96. I believe in the floor. I put it in place and I walk on it. Faith is a floor. If you don't work at making it for yourself, you have nothing to walk on.
Gregory Maguire
#97. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#98. Her head had turned quickly away ... Not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence.
Gregory Maguire
#99. He was hungry without yet knowing that hunger could be slaked by food; he was lonely without yet knowing that loneliness could be slaked, too.
Gregory Maguire
#100. It never is the who, is it? It's always the why. -Elphaba
Gregory Maguire
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