Gregory Maguire Quotes

The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.

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

Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.

She watched the sun bleed water out of the icicle. Warm and cold working together to make an icicle. Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

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.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

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

I know you don't want to hear this but someone has to say it! You are out of control! I mean they're just shoes... let it go!

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.

Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

quoting reminds me there are other people in the world besides only me. And other thoughts besides mine, and other ways of thinking.

While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon.

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

The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.

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.

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.

People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

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

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.

In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.

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.

Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.

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.

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

Of course. You get everything from books.

It's unbecoming," she agreed. "A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.

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

I had written childrens 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.

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

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?

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

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

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?

Just follow that one road the whole time!... I hope they don't get lost, I'm so bad at giving directions.

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

It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.

There was much to hate in this world and too much to love.

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.

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.

One plus one equals both.

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.

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

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

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.

They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.