Gregory Maguire

“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 bind and release in a more salutary way.”

“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.”

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

“The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again. Everything was not merely relative, it was--how to put it? --relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.”

“When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.”

“But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before.”

“Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.”

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

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

“Glinda used her glitter beads, and you used your exotic looks and background, but weren't you just doing the same thing, trying to maximize what you had in order to get what you wanted? 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 anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

“Brrr, who had never admired books particularly...didn't remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.”

“I believe in the floor. I put it in place and I walk on it. Faith is a floor. If you don't work at making it for yourself, you have nothing to walk on.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Of course. You get everything from books.”

“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.”

“As years pass, and the abundance of the future is depleted, the crux of old mistakes and the cost of old choices are ever recalibrated. Resentment, the interest in umbrage derived from being wronged, is computed minute by minute, savagely, however you try to ignore it.”

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

“[after discussion about what evil is, a question asked to Elphaba on why she killed Madame Morrible]"Why did you do it?" asked the hostess with spirit.The Witch shrugged. "For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.”

“...but she wrote out some extra words on a piece of paper so Rain could practice reading. "Is this a magic spell?" the girl asked her."Don't let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it is a moronic proclamation by the Emperor.  Words have their impact, girl.  Mind your manners.  I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing."-Out of Oz”

“One doesn't know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one's life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime.”

“Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.”

“To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.”

“We live in our tales of ourselves. . . and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls. . .”

“I'm not involved in shame. Morals are learned in childhood, and I didn't have any such holiday called childhood.”

“Men were beasts. Everyone knew that.”

“Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.”

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

“What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.”

“What words she had thought to write on the face of the moon were washed away from her as she submerged, trying to disturb no one, nothing. Trying not so much as to interrupt a current, even trying not to shatter into soft-edged platelets the green moon in the reflection. Trying to sidestep having any influence at all, now and till the end of her life.”

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

“A little bird told me," said the Lion.”

“Horrors.”

“I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.”

“I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.”

“To grow a song, you must plant a note.”

“(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 bus stop of faith, sort of, and what's a building?”

“Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history”

“I never talk about the end game." He winked at her. "I've lived so long without death that I've stopped believing in it.”

“I was quite a looker in my time," she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know she must be hideous?"Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?”

“He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little.”

“In her time Nor Tigelaar had faced insurrectionists and collaborationists and war profiteers. She'd endured abduction and prison and self-mutilation. She'd sold herself in sex not for cash but for military information that might come in handy to the resistance, and in so doing she'd come across a rum variety of human types.”

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

“The boy does well enough," said Vicente. "A goose does not ask much of life, after all.""No," she admitted. "Those who ask much are more likely disappointed. We should all be as simple as the goose.”

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

“We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.”

“As pessoas dizem «meu Deus!» a toda a hora, mas habitualmente querem dizer «ora bolas».”

“Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.”

“It's unbecoming," she agreed. "A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.”