Gregory Maguire quotes
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“Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.”
-- Gregory MaguireSource : "Fictional character: The Wizard". "Wicked", Broadway musical, 2003.
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“Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“As long as people are going to call you lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.”
-- Gregory MaguireSource : Gregory Maguire (2009). “Mirror Mirror: A Novel”, p.2, Harper Collins
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“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 -
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“Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.”
-- 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 -
“Yes, I'm nervous. You'll find in time most people are. They simply learn better how to disguise it, and sometimes, if they're wise, how to use their anxiety to serve the public good.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“I hate to be obvious," added the Scarecrow, "but you'd have saved yourself a heap of trouble if you weren't too cheap to invest in a leash, Dorothy.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.”
-- 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 -
“Of course. You get everything from books.”
-- 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 -
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“There was much to hate in this world and too much to love.”
-- Gregory MaguireSource : Gregory Maguire (2011). “Wicked”, p.247, Hachette UK
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“I know you don't want to hear this but someone has to say it! You are out of control! I mean they're just shoes... let it go!”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness-and life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“How deeply bound by cords of family anger we all are[...]None of us breaks free.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“I learned failure early and mastered it.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however, that shortly thereafter, the Wizard absconded from the Palace. He left in the way he had first arrived-- a hot-air balloon-- just a few hours before seditious ministers were to lead a Palace revolt and to hold an execution without trial.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“You confuse not speaking with not listening.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis, those who are the most themselves are the victims.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Why lock yourself in your own cage when someone is handing you a key?”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“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 specifically you harvest- the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“at least i'm talkng to myself. instead of giving myself the cold shoulder”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“...What is the use of beauty? i have lived my life surrounded by painters, and still I do not know the answer. But i suspect, some days, that beauty helps protect the spirit of mankind, swaddle it and succor it, so that we might survive. Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes or lives less miserable so that we might be more kind-well, then, lets have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.”
-- Gregory MaguireSource : Gregory Maguire (2013). “The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz”, p.173, Harper Collins
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“Just follow that one road the whole time!... I hope they don't get lost, I'm so bad at giving directions..”
-- 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 world was floods above and fire below”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“To consider what other people might say is hardly a good reason to take action or to defer it. You have your own life to live, Iris, and at its end, the only opinion that amounts to anything is that which God bestows”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“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.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“You're fun to look at," decided Galinda. Boq's face fell. "Fun?" he said. I'd give a lot to achieve fun," Elphaba said. "The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they're usually referring to digestion-”
-- 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 -
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“...the reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“The truth isn't a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“It's unbecoming," she agreed. "A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“Elena had always felt like the center of her own world - who doesn't? The world arranged itself around her like petals around the stem of a flower. This way the meadows, that way the woodland. Over here, the baryn's estate, out there, the hills that hug the known world close and imply a world at beyond. She could never come up with the edge of a world, because it always kept going on beyond. She moved the center of the world as she walked. The world was balanced on her head.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Forgive us our trespasses," says Margarethe, "and get out of our way.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“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.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“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.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“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 opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.”
-- 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 -
“It's been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“I write because I admire the act of rationalization, of seeking clarity in one's understanding of the complexities of life, and I'm bad at it. I'm slow. Writing, which is an arduous and slow process, proceeds at the same rate as my sloth-like mind.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“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 -
“Don't wish,"said Rain, "don't start. Wishing only...”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.”
-- 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 -
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“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 -
“[Puggles] "What population signs on willingly for slavery?" "You mean other than wives?" [Glinda]”
-- Gregory MaguireSource : Gregory Maguire (2011). “Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years”, p.37, Harper Collins
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“She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.”
-- 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 -
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“That's what misbehavior is all about, just a little extra loving being asked for.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“...and he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, little by little by little.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Always the bridesmaid , never the bride." Always the godfather, never the god".”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“It’s the place of the story, beginning here, in the meadow of late summer flowers, thriving before the Atlantic storms drive wet and winter upon them all.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Immortality is a chancy thing; it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is.”
-- 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 -
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“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.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. Beautiful in the concept, if we're lucky, but frequently tedious or regrettable as we flesh ourselves out.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing. If one could drown in the grass...it might be the best way to die.”
-- 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 -
“... 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.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“He knew about being alone. The weather was always cold there.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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“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.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn't rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled,...it is Art.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“Begging your pardon, sir....One population can't make peace with another by force.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
“A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him -so why bother?- but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible.”
-- Gregory Maguire -
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