Quotes by 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.”

“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 thral...”

“Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.”

“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.”

“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 world was floods above and fire below”

“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...”

“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...”

“To grow a melody?" "You can't grow a melody on purpose, she said, and slyly added, you have to plant an accidental.”

“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 o...”

“Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.”

“Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.”

“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...”

“Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.”

“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 ...”

“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 t...”

“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.”

“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.”

“Come what may and hell to pay.”

“I care as much as I can, but I dont spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve.”