Quotes by Gregory Maguire

“Night-time is being brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.”

“Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was...”

“What will I do if I find myself with a heart?" "Lose it constantly, I imagine.”

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

“O beautiful, to make escapeAnd leave this world behind.Had I to stay another dayI'd lose my fucking mind!”

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

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

“(from the short story The Honorary Shepherds)...you can't be kicked out of a faith. Faith starts inside your heart and ends up in eternity. All you can be kicked out of is a building, which is the ...”

“It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.”

“He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the infe...”

“No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.”

“I have always felt like a pawn... My skin color's been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life ...”

“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...”

“Of course. You get everything from books.”

“Dont let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if its a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind...”

“But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.”

“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...”

“I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.”

“You could say that Elphaba brought us together,' said Boq softly. 'I'm closer to her and so I'm closer to you.'Galinda seemed to give up. She leaned her head back on the velvet cushions of the swin...”

“She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn't smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It's something else. Maybe ...”