Gregory Maguire Quotes - Page 2

At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change.
Gregory Maguire
If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.
Gregory Maguire
What is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it.
Gregory Maguire
Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.
Gregory Maguire
Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle
Gregory Maguire
Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.
Gregory Maguire
A world emerging, daily, out of nothing, a world that we trust to resemble what we've seen previously. We should know better.
Gregory Maguire
I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.
Gregory Maguire
But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.
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
I have always felt like a pawn... My skin color's been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life's work of my own, I haven't found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that.
Gregory Maguire
He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they 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
What will I do if I find myself with a heart?" "Lose it constantly, I imagine.
Gregory Maguire
Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear yet...She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart. But there was more than one way to be smart.
Gregory Maguire
She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn't smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It's something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experience the long-held suspicion of our species, that the enchanted world of childhood is merely a mask for something else, a more subtle and paradoxical magic.- p. 157
Gregory Maguire
It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?
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
Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.
Gregory Maguire
Come what may and hell to pay.
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
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
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
Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.
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
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
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
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
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
Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.
Gregory Maguire
Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history
Gregory Maguire
Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.
Gregory Maguire
Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.
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
To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.
Gregory Maguire
It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.
Gregory Maguire
O beautiful, to make escapeAnd leave this world behind.Had I to stay another dayI'd lose my fucking mind!
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
Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.
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
And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.
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
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
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
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
Of course. You get everything from books.
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
No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.
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
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
Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.
Gregory Maguire
But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him "Yero, my hero," and that melted his heart.
Gregory Maguire
I care as much as I can, but I don’t spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve.
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
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
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
The world was floods above and fire below
Gregory Maguire
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.
Gregory Maguire
Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.
Gregory Maguire