Gregory Maguire Quotes

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

~ Gregory Maguire

The world was floods above and fire below

~ Gregory Maguire

Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing -- by dint of ignorance and innocence -- that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way.

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

I care as much as I can, but I don’t spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

(from the short story The Honorary Shepherds)...you can't be kicked out of a faith. Faith starts inside your heart and ends up in eternity. All you can be kicked out of is a building, which is the bus stop of faith, sort of, and what's a building?

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

~ Gregory Maguire

Of course. You get everything from books.

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.

~ Gregory Maguire

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?

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

Night-time is being 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.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

The tedious never die, that's what makes them tedious.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history

~ Gregory Maguire

The real thing about evil… you figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

But this was fancy, she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

Come what may and hell to pay.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

~ Gregory Maguire

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

~ Gregory Maguire