S. Gregory Quotes

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.

If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, that might be the best way to die.

...perhaps charity is the kind of beauty that we comprehend the best because we miss it the most.

The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective.

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

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.

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

She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go.

I learned failure early and mastered it.

Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.

So she listened hard. And she began to evolve, because stories work their magic that way. They build conviction and erode conviction in equal measure.

...looking at him makes her feel like laughing all over - as if she could laugh not just with her mouth but with her eyes, her heart, her very limbs.

I learned to fly on a broom," he said, rolling up his sleeves. "I can learn to milk a goat, I bet." Though flying on a broom proved to be the easier task, he found.

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.

The storm dropped a house on her head.