Top 100 Gregory Maguire Quotes
#1. Oh, mercy, there is nothing monstrously ugly about you. Ruth may be unpleasing, but you are merely plain. If anything, it's my beauty that's monstrous, for it sweeps away any other aspect of my character.
Gregory Maguire
#2. Don't be disgusting.
Don't dare me. I majored in disgusting at Gulag Community College. Lucrezia Borgia taught cooking, and Madame Defarge taught knitting. Emperor Nero taught violin and also led the cheerleading squad. I skipped all my classes and failed with distinction.
Gregory Maguire
#3. Within a few moments the last of day became the first of night, a magic as peculiar and welcome as any other.
Gregory Maguire
#4. How deeply bound by cords of family anger we all are[ ... ]None of us breaks free.
Gregory Maguire
#5. He set out once more, with a sense that his life would be rich in setting outs, and perhaps poorer in homecomings.
Gregory Maguire
#6. To look into the mirror is to see the future, in blood and rubies.
Gregory Maguire
#7. Then, abrupt and decisive, the Emerald City rose before them. A city of insistence, of blanket declaration. It made no sense, clotting up the horizon, sprouting like a mirage on the characterless plains of central Oz. Glinda hated it from the moment she saw it. Brash upstart of a city.
Gregory Maguire
#8. I actually prefer female voices to listen to, mostly, but among the male singers whose voices I like are Jeff Buckley, Art Garfunkel, that sort of voice. Contemporary crooners rather than rockers.
Gregory Maguire
#10. We all have our shortcomings, it seems, though some are less visible than others.
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
#13. In the lives of children, pumpkins can turn into coaches, mice and rats into human beings. When we grow up, we learn that it's far more common for human beings to turn into rats.
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
#16. Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?
Gregory Maguire
#17. The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.
Gregory Maguire
#18. Don't take the advice of anyone you meet here. We're all mad.
Gregory Maguire
#19. He shook his ladle overhead as if summoning the wrath of angel chefs among the stars.
Gregory Maguire
#21. The world pauses for royalty and deformity alike, and sometimes one can't tell the difference.
Gregory Maguire
#22. He spoke in one of the American accents; Lydia couldn't distinguish among them. To her they all sounded dry and tinny. Almost quack-like.
Gregory Maguire
#23. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#24. The premise is prejudicial and proves that what's wanted here isn't a trial but a conviction.
Gregory Maguire
#25. Every choice brings wisdom in its wake. If you got to have the wisdom first, it wouldn't be a choice
just policy
Gregory Maguire
#26. When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.
Gregory Maguire
#27. The decades looked on and didn't notice her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn't see revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.
Gregory Maguire
#28. Alice less winsome than weird, and treated Lydia like a Cerberus,
Gregory Maguire
#29. Boq sat down, and shook his head, as if bewildered by the apparition of Elphaba.
Gregory Maguire
#30. Is it the sheer nature of the beast within, the human animal inside the Human Being?
Gregory Maguire
#31. How brave that had made her feel, and how vulnerable too.
Gregory Maguire
#32. Noon is a disguise of whiteness put on by the eternal Night behind it.
Gregory Maguire
#33. belongs. I can't afford so much as a footman to scour Saint Petersburg." "You must afford it. It is said, 'One
Gregory Maguire
#34. And Ama Clutch was gone, and the overly subordinate pillowcase took a small spill of human juice from the edge of her slackened mouth.
Gregory Maguire
#35. The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.
Gregory Maguire
#36. It isn't whether you do it well or ill, it's that you do it all.
Gregory Maguire
#38. 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
#39. Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.
Gregory Maguire
#40. Begging your pardon, sir ... One population can't make peace with another by force.
Gregory Maguire
#43. And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.'
Did she ever come out?'
Not yet.
Gregory Maguire
#45. Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It's so much like home, and then it holds out on you.
Gregory Maguire
#46. Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met
Gregory Maguire
#47. With all those stars in the sky, why isn't there enough light for us to see by? We stumble like blinded sheep.'
'As you can see, it is clouding over. The stars can't pierce the gloom; they just wait it out. That isn't the stars fault. It is their custom to stay heavenly.
Gregory Maguire
#48. We are an experiment in situation ethics set by the unnamed god.
Gregory Maguire
#49. I'm a comic writer, in some ways, and a comic person when I'm up at a podium, in order to disguise the fact that in my heart I'm disgustingly earnest.
Gregory Maguire
#50. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#51. 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
#52. One doesn't know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one's life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime.
Gregory Maguire
#53. So - if the oldest memories could contaminate one another, could prove impossible - what good was memory at al?
Gregory Maguire
#54. The eye is always drawn to light, but shadows have more to say.
Gregory Maguire
#55. I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.
Gregory Maguire
#56. Lot of talky-talk in there, they had to open the windows to let the words out,
Gregory Maguire
#58. Skibbereen have a hard time at [math]; the best that the smartest of them can do with adding two plus two is guessing: three plus one. Correct, sort of, but not always useful.
Gregory Maguire
#59. When have we required anything of you? Except to survive?
Gregory Maguire
#60. And there the wicked old witch stayed for a good long time ... And did she ever come out? ... Not yet.
Gregory Maguire
#61. Everybody needs to grow up and leave home sometimes. But sometimes home doesn't like it.
Gregory Maguire
#62. Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow.
Gregory Maguire
#64. Notice, notice; let noticing take the place of screaming.
Gregory Maguire
#65. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#66. The last light with any real warmth had been at home, long ago, in a place and a time that no longer existed, with people whose names he didn't say even inside his own mind.
Gregory Maguire
#67. Stinging words! You re critical of everyone," observes Iris. "Oh, not everyone," says Clara in an offhand manner. "Only everybody who's alive as well as most people who are dead. I feel quite neutral about anybody not yet born.
Gregory Maguire
#68. Such silly things, children - and so embarrassing - because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something.
Gregory Maguire
#69. She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go.
Gregory Maguire
#70. Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them.
Gregory Maguire
#71. We are the next thing the Time Dragon is dreaming, and nothing to be done about it.
Gregory Maguire
#72. Everyone dies. It's a question of where and how, that's all.
Gregory Maguire
#73. We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out.
Gregory Maguire
#74. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#75. 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
#76. We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.
Gregory Maguire
#78. Against the mutability of dream, the natural laws advocated by our bewigged Enlightenment forebears are powerless. Newton, for instance, insists on gravity and other prohibitions of the physical world, from which (while we are awake) we are never free. But we can fly in dreams.
Gregory Maguire
#79. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#81. No, my girl, you know nothing of how we women are imprisoned in our lives, but there are ways to determine the sentence we must serve.
Gregory Maguire
#82. My job is to protect you, Lady Glinda even if you are loosing your mind.
Gregory Maguire
#83. Your transparency is just another one of your disguises, isn't it?
Gregory Maguire
#84. Immortality is a chancy thing; it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is.
Gregory Maguire
#85. Those who are roped into bed at night often fall into delusions of flight.
Gregory Maguire
#86. 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.
Gregory Maguire
#87. The person who would become a lifelong reader should stumble upon very rich stuff first, early, and often. It lived within, a most agreeable kind of haunting.
Gregory Maguire
#88. 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
#89. It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?
Gregory Maguire
#90. Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they've imagined us.
Gregory Maguire
#91. Marmalade has to make its own way in life, like the rest of us, she thought.
Gregory Maguire
#92. It's the age of daring. It's the only time we have. We must live in the present. We are young and alive.
Gregory Maguire
#93. Yes, I'm nervous. You'll find in time most people are. They simply learn better how to disguise it, and sometimes, if they're wise, how to use their anxiety to serve the public good.
Gregory Maguire
#94. Only, sometimes, in the text of a book here and there, we tap the page with a finger and say, This is what my lost days were like. Something like this.
Gregory Maguire
#95. They hadn't come so far just to be turned away because of adolescent radicalism.
Gregory Maguire
#96. 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
#98. They had ganged up on her, in the claustrophobic, loving way of families, and she wanted no more of it.
Gregory Maguire
#99. Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.
Gregory Maguire
#100. The Ozmists around him went iridescent emerald, like light striking a thousand whirring beetles in flight, gold and emerald, emerald and gold, the colors of Lurlinemas, the colors of pine polen in champagne sunlight.
Gregory Maguire
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