Gregory Maguire Quotes

If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.

I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.

I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.

at least i'm talkng to myself. instead of giving myself the cold shoulder

The world was floods above and fire below

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

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

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

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.

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.

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.

The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man.

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.

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

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

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.

In the end, all disguises must drop.

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

For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.

His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.

This is why you shouldn't fall in love, it blinds you. Love is wicked distraction.

I actually prefer female voices to listen to, mostly, but among the male singers whose voices I like are Jeff Buckley, Art Garfunkel, that sort of voice. Contemporary crooners rather than rockers.

That's what misbehavior is all about, just a little extra loving being asked for.

...and he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, little by little by little.

In a sense, Out of Oz is an examination of how individuals keep going, keep reinventing themselves and their lives, even after life-altering complications have afflicted them.

I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.

What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.

Forgive us our trespasses," says Margarethe, "and get out of our way.

Skibbereen have a hard time at [math]; the best that the smartest of them can do with adding two plus two is guessing: three plus one. Correct, sort of, but not always useful.

I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.

...No opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.

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.

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

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.' Did she ever come out?' Not yet.

Her sister's shoes. They sparkeled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkeled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood and thorny stars.

So he stalked her again. Love makes hunters of us all.

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

He knew about being alone. The weather was always cold there.

... the decades looked on and didn't notice her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn't see revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.

Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly.

It isn't whether you do it well or ill, it's that you do it all.

Are you the dart?" he said. "Are you the knife? The fuse?" She said (though he wasn't convinced): "My deane, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad.

No," she cried, "no, no, I'm not a harem, I'm not a woman, I'm not a person, no.

Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don't forget we loved it when we were alive.

Why lock yourself in your own cage when someone is handing you a key?

I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can.

...the reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.