Gregory Maguire Quotes

Was it an accident... or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew?

~ Gregory Maguire

Everyone has a right to love the land that gave them the things they need to live. It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think... that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to allow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful too.

~ Gregory Maguire

Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

By so giving up, of course, it renews itself- that is the secret

~ Gregory Maguire

Isn't that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger--

~ Gregory Maguire

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

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

~ Gregory Maguire

We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out.

~ Gregory Maguire

We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out.

~ Gregory Maguire

Night is 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

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!

~ Gregory Maguire

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!

~ Gregory Maguire

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.

~ Gregory Maguire

Her head had turned quickly away...Not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

Immortality is a chancy thing, it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is.

~ Gregory Maguire

He was not so lucky. He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.

~ Gregory Maguire

He lingered at the door, and said, 'The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you wan

~ Gregory Maguire

In the end, all disguises must drop.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

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

~ Gregory Maguire

When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.

~ Gregory Maguire

You can't be said to have properly established yourself in a place until you have been seen there.

~ Gregory Maguire

Nothing in the Grimmerie on how to depose a tyrant - nothing useful... Nothing there that described why men and women could turn out so horrible. Or so wonderful - if that ever happens anymore.

~ Gregory Maguire

In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.

~ Gregory Maguire

But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

~ Gregory Maguire

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.

~ Gregory Maguire

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

It’s been a long, rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.

~ Gregory Maguire

People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

~ Gregory Maguire

The story of 'Mirror Mirror' is in many ways a story about evolution. It's about the evolution of a child into an adult. It's about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. It's about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.

~ Gregory Maguire

I like to think I'm a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions.

~ Gregory Maguire