Gregory Maguire Quotes

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
It’s been a long, rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.
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
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
In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.
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
You can't be said to have properly established yourself in a place until you have been seen there.
Gregory Maguire
When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.
Gregory Maguire
The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.
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
In the end, all disguises must drop.
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
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
Well, I learned to cook. At my age," she told him. "What's next? Art therapy? Anyway, I've had quite a time of it this summer, and who knows what eases down on any road. Come, Rain. A quick goodbye, and off you go." "Goodbye," said Rain to the Lion, and then to the woman. "Not to them," said Glinda, "To me."She turned eyes that were saucerly upon Glinda. "Mum?
Gregory Maguire
Don't wish,"said Rain, "don't start. Wishing only...
Gregory Maguire
This is what fun is like," said Rain, almost to herself.
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
Her head had turned quickly away...Not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence.
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
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
Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!
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
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
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
Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.
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
Isn't that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger--
Gregory Maguire
By so giving up, of course, it renews itself- that is the secret
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
Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.
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
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
The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again. Everything was not merely relative, it was--how to put it? --relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.
Gregory Maguire
Do good though, will you?" She blinked brightly at the green girl. "If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me?
Gregory Maguire
You leave home, I have learned, counting the trip day by day. If you ever get to return, you count the trip miracle by miracle.
Gregory Maguire
And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations.
Gregory Maguire
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
They'd never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they'd been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.
Gregory Maguire
As the first hard drops of rain fell, the Witch caught sight, not of the girl's face, but of the shoes. Her sister's shoes. They sparkled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood, and thorny stars.
Gregory Maguire
To the grim poor there need be no pourquoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. 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...?
Gregory Maguire
I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral," said the Wizard. "In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical.
Gregory Maguire
The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man.
Gregory Maguire
Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on - or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense
Gregory Maguire
Glinda waved dismissively. Then she tucked her hand against her mouth and bit her knuckles. It was hard to tell if her pretty ways were studied or innate. "Oh, oh," she managed, "I don't know that I'll see you again- and you remind me so of her.
Gregory Maguire
A notion of character, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives. They woke up, were they lucky enough to have consciousness, in the act of doing something they already knew how to do: feeding themselves with currants. Walking the dog. Knotting up a broken bootlace. Singing antiphonally in the choir. Suddenly: This is I, I am the girl singing this alto line off-key, I am the boy loping after the dog, and I can see myself doing it as, presumably, the dog cannot see itself. How peculiar! I lift on my toes at the end of the dock, to dive into the lake because I am hot, and while isolated like a specimen in the glassy slide of summer, the notions of hot and lake and I converge into a consciousness of consciousness–in an instant, in between launch and landing, even before I cannonball into the lake, shattering both my reflection and my old notion of myself.
Gregory Maguire
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? It is at the very least a question of definitions.
Gregory Maguire
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?
Gregory Maguire
It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.
Gregory Maguire
It isn't hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.
Gregory Maguire
The real thing about evil," said the Witch at the doorway, "isn't any of what you said. You figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It's like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.
Gregory Maguire
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
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.
Gregory Maguire
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.
Gregory Maguire
Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page – but then the world is the same way, isn’t it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.
Gregory Maguire
What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get – the more specificity you harvest – the more precious becomes every ounce and spam. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).
Gregory Maguire
We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...
Gregory Maguire
Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met
Gregory Maguire
There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.
Gregory Maguire
The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.
Gregory Maguire