Best 244 quotes of Gregory Maguire on MyQuotes

A capacity for inferiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation by squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hallowness. The syndrom especially plaques anyone who lives behind a mask. An elephant in her disquise as a human princess, a scarecrow with painted features, a glittering tiara under which to glow and glide in anonymous glamour. A witch's hat, a wizards stole, a scholars gown, a soldiers dress sartorials. A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I nkow what I know.

All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn't we hear a voice of prophecy.

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.

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.

And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.

...and he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, little by little by little.

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

And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.' Did she ever come out?' Not yet.

Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!

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.

As long as people are going to call you lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

at least i'm talkng to myself. instead of giving myself the cold shoulder

Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.

Before you save anyone else, you have to save yourself. otherwise, you'rejust a bundle of tics, a stringed puppet manipulated by the chance and the insensible wind.

Begging your pardon, sir....One population can't make peace with another by force.

Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate," said Elphaba. "See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something?

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.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

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.

...but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn't hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.

Children are wickeder than adults, they have no sense of restraint.

Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on - or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense

Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?

Doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction.

Don't wish,"said Rain, "don't start. Wishing only...

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.

Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life.

Even God used silence as a strategy.

Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.

Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don't forget we loved it when we were alive.

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.

Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless youre really depressed or something, the person in the mirror generally looks a little more competent, a little more curious, a little more intelligent than you actually feel yourself to be? They often look more interesting and more soulful.

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.

Her sister's shoes. They sparkeled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkeled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood and thorny stars.

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.

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

However in the world did her skin come green?" Nanny wondered, stupidly, for Melena blanched and Frex reddened, and the baby held her breath as if trying to turn blue to please them all. Nanny had to slap her to make her breath again.

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

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.

I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.

I do love to sing. Had I a longer set of thigh bones and a sweeter voice, I should have loved to be a performer.

I don't like work like that. I am the silent partner. I work through events, I live on the sidelines, I dabble in causes and effects, I watch how the misbegotten creatures of this world live their lives.

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

If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.

If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.

I had written childrens books for 14 years before I published Wicked. And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

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.

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.

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.

I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.