Gregory Maguire Quotes

Ah, the inner eye blinks, and the spirit trembles, at the dangerous cost of seeing one's self as one is.

You collect a hunderd pennies in one minute by Master's timepiece and you bought yourself free. Then they shakes a jar of coppers onto the belly of a shovel and holds it over the campfire long time. When they think it fun enough, they say, get yourself ready, and now you go, boy. The pennies go in the dirt around the fire and I got to pick them up and keep hold on them." "Oh," said Ada, with a sound like a kind of punch in the air, or out of it. "I gets forty-two hot cents before that minute up," he said, holding out his hands again. "Here's the proof." "Oh," she said. "And no freedom." "Nothing next, but that we left," he said. "One by one, and not on the same path, turns out." "And here you are." "And wherever this be, I don't know. Some mystery or t'other." She lifted her shoulders and dropped them. "Well. With me I suppose.

The master is bringing Darwin through to examine lower life-forms, Rhoda. Straighten your spine or you'll be mistook for a mollusk.

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.

For one short wet month early in the next year the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water frothing at the hedges bubbling at the roadside splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower

A story in a book has its own intentions, even if unknowable to the virgin reader, who just lollops along at her own pace regardless of the author's strategies, and gets where she will. After all, a book can be set aside for weeks, or for good. (Burned in the grate.) Alternatively, a story can be adored for centuries. But it cannot be derailed. A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking. It is progressive and inevitable as the seasons. Winter still comes after autumn though you may have died over the summer.

I was just about to begin writing 'Mirror Mirror', within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.

Of course. You get everything from books.

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

As an old friend of mine once said when I brought him some interesting brownies, 'You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes,'" she replied. "Haven't you read your Maimonides?

Do good though, will you?" She blinked brightly at the green girl. "If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me?

Her voice is hoarse. She's caught a catarrh from that dreadful draft.

What had survived - maybe all that had survived of Trism - was Liir's sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression - unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir's heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism's glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing.

You lost your copper as well as your faith in wishes, and prayers.

Not in a dog's age. Not since that Dorothy. And you and the others. Did Dorothy ever stop whimpering so? She'll grow up to require the convent, mark my words. Or a husband with a good strong backhand. Her fanny wants spanking badly.

The family was still hard-pressed for money, and dreamed of savory treats to eat, but they had the warmth of one another, and enough on which to live, and in most parts of the world that is called plenty.

No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.

Not everyone can fly by bubble !

They had ganged up on her, in the claustrophobic, loving way of families, and she wanted no more of it.

What will I do if I find myself with a heart?" "Lose it constantly, I imagine.

It never is the who, is it? It's always the why. -Elphaba

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.

And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no "after", in the "ever after" of a Witch there is no "happily"; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is-alas, or perhaps thank mercy-no telling. She was dead, dead, and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.

The boy does well enough," said Vicente. "A goose does not ask much of life, after all."
"No," she admitted. "Those who ask much are more likely disappointed. We should all be as simple as the goose.

All paths lead to the same place, and that place is whatever comes next.

This girl who seemed, increasingly, to be interested in learning to read everything except how human beings talked to one another.

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.

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.

Everything changes you, and you change everything.

I think that's shameful, even if it's just a story, to propose an afterlife for evil ... Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. It's shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward.

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.

That's the beginning of heroism, the decision to try.

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.

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?

After all is said and done," said the Dormouse, "there is nothing to be done. Or said.

It would have made a nice painting, were someone to choose something as lowly as that to study. Another story, a story written in oils rather than one painted on porcelain. But to be most effective, the faces of the children would need to be painted in a blur, the way all children's faces truly are. For they blur as they run; they blur as they grow and change so fast; and they blur to keep us from loving them too deeply, for their protection, and also for ours.

And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.'
Did she ever come out?'
Not yet.

When I began 'Wicked', I really thought of it entirely as a one-off, as the English say. There was no intention that there should ever be a follow up, because the subtitle was 'The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West'. She was dead and gone, as the book says, at the end.

Gossip is instructive," said the Wizard. "It tells which way the wind is blowing.

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.

O beautiful, to make escape
And leave this world behind.
Had I to stay another day
I'd lose my fucking mind...

And that aroma of sex ... soft baby asparagus cut with a weak solution of Clorox.

For who was in thrall to whom, really? And could it ever be known? Each agent working in collusion and antagonism - like the cold and the sun alike creating a deadly spear of ice ... Who is in thrall to whom? And while you wait to learn, the deadly icicle, formed by all opposing forces, falls and drives its cold nail into penetrable flesh.

The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness.

You need my help? What for? Bread, cash, a fake identity to help you slip sideways through the cracks? Tell me what you need, tell me why I should help, and I'll see what I can do. In memory of Elphaba. You knew her." Her head titled again, but up, this time, and it was to keep the sudden wetness from spilling into her carefully colored false eyelashes. "You knew my Elphie!

History crawls along on the peg legs of small individual lives," said Frex, "and at the same time larger eternal forces converge. You can't attend to both arenas at once." "Our child may not have a small life.

Even God used silence as a strategy.

It isn't whether you do it well or ill, it's that you do it all.

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

You can't criticize the size of a world.

Do you expect to learn anything at Shiz?" he asked. "I have already learned not to speak to strangers." "Then I will introduce myself and we will be strangers no longer. I am Dillamond." "I am disinclined to know you.

You two are just up the stairs. Next to my room, so I can keep an eye on you should you get up to anything."
"What's your name so I can call it out during wild sex?

There were a great many jokes about the disaster (house falling on and killing Wicked Witch of the East), naturally. "You can't hide from desinty, that house had her name on it" "That Nessarose, she was giving such a good speech about religious lessons, she really brought down the house!" "Everybody needs to grow up and leave home sometimes, but sometimes HOME DOESN'T LIKE IT." "What's the different between a shooting star and a falling house?" "One which is propitious grants delicious wishes, the other which is vicious squishes witches." "What's big, thick, makes the earth move, and wants to have its way with you?" "I don't know, but can you introduce me?

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.

The wall read:
ELPHIE LIVES
OZMA LIVES
THE WIZARD LIVES
and then
EVERYONE LIVES BUT US.

All green things brown.

We can't leave just like that." Cat was appalled. "Where can we find you if we need you again?"
[Baba Yaga] "You can't. Listen, Little Drear, I hate saying good-byes. I have a good strategy for avoiding them."
"What's that?" asked Anton.
"I eat my guests.

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

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

And there the wicked old witch stayed for a good long time ... And did she ever come out? ... Not yet.

Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish to hell he'd go away.

Lot of talky-talk in there, they had to open the windows to let the words out,

I had written children's books for 14 years before I published 'Wicked.' And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.

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

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.

When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil, and maybe splits apart and multiplies.

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

Alice less winsome than weird, and treated Lydia like a Cerberus,

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.

You could say that Elphaba brought us together,' said Boq softly. 'I'm closer to her and so I'm closer to you.'
Galinda seemed to give up. She leaned her head back on the velvet cushions of the swing and said, 'Boq, you know despite myself I think you're a little sweet. You're a little sweet and you're a little charming and you're a little maddening and you're a little habit-forming.'
Boq held his breath.
But you're little!' she concluded. 'You're a Munchkin, for god's sake!'
He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little.

I do love to sing. Had I a longer set of thigh bones and a sweeter voice, I should have loved to be a performer.

How very like a dream this all is.

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

He had no other plans for the rest of his life. He followed her.

She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet.

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.

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.

Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing.
If one could drown in the grass ... it might be the best way to die.

Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them.

Approval is overrated ... Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without.

How brave that had made her feel, and how vulnerable too.

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.

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.

In my raveling thoughts I flew away, as if my spirit were nestled in the breast feathers of some passing hornbill or waxwing.

I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.

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

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.

An odor of June mud, backwashed with essence of meadow-grass and a whiff of cow.

The alien girl - she called herself Dorothy - was by virtue of her survival elevated to living sainthood. The dog was merely annoying.

It's heaven to know that it's still possible to run, though she doesn't know what she's running from.

Why should I keep myself so safe?" he asked her, but he was almost asking himself. What is there in my life worth preserving? With a good wife back there in the mountains, serviceable as an old spoon, dry in the heart from having been scared of marriage since she was six? With three children so shy of their father, the Prince of the Arjikis, that they will hardly come near him? With a careworn clan moving here, moving there, going through th same disputes, herding the same herds, as thy have done for five hundred years? And me, with a shallow and undirected mind, no artfulness in word or habit, no especial kindness toward the world? What is there that makes my life worth preserving?
"I love you," said Elphaba.
"So that's that then, and that's it," he answered her and himself. "And I love you. So I promise to be careful.

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.

Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life.

When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn't any reclaiming it or revising it.

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.

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.

They hadn't come so far just to be turned away because of adolescent radicalism.

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

By evening, when the winds rose yet again, the power began to stutter at half-strength, and the sirens to fail. From those streetlights whose bulbs hadn't been stoned, a tea-colored dusk settled in uncertain tides. It fell on the dirty militias of pack dogs, all bullying and foaming against one another, and on the abandoned cars, and everything - everything - was flattened, equalized in the gloom of half-light. Like the subjects in a browning photograph in some antique photo album, only these times weren't antique. They were now.