Gregory Maguire Quotes

No one is exempt from grief.

Speaking uses us up, speeds us up. Without prayer, that act of confession for merely existing, one might live forever and not know it.

It's the work that's important, not the individual who does it.

Only he with the hobbled foot fully knows the beauty of running. Only he with the severed ear can apprehend what the sweetest music must sound like. Our ailments complete us.

And it's a cold place the world, especially when warmed by arsen.

For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.

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.

Oh now that's a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future

The colossal might of wickedness: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.

Happy endings are still endings.

Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.

There were more ways to live than the ones given by one's superiors

Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?

It's the only condition I know. Bitter Love, Loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.

In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realize it is far more common for men to turn into rats.

Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow.

Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven. So you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.

She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she.

It's the endlessly thinking about yourself that causes such heart shame.

A man is called a traitor, or liberator. A rich man is a thief or philanthropist. Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It's all in which label is able to persist.

That's all I want- to do no harm.

How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.

How deeply bound by cords of family anger we all are[...]None of us breaks free.

...I dabble in causes and effects.

There may be no city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.

Everyone dies. It's a question of where and how, that's all.