Gregory Maguire

“Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last”

“Only he with the hobbled foot knows the beauty of running. Only he with the severed ear can appreciate what the sweetest music must sound like. Our ailments complete us. That we in our sinful souls can ever imagine charity- 'She can't go on for a moment. 'We may not always be able to practice charity, but that in this world we can even imagine it at all! That act of daring requires the greatest challenge,”

“I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can.”

“It's heaven to know that it's still possible to run, though she doesn't know what she's running from.”

“But I must pay attention now, she thinks, because what other choice is there? Maybe when I die my soul will fly to meet God, but when that time comes I won't have the use of clever hands, nor the burden of an ugly face; hands and face will be planted like bulbs in the soil, while only the bloom of the spirit emerges elsewhere. So let my hands and my face make their way in the world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.”

“Aren't these the finest treasures? Each one springs up, and becomes more red than rubies, more fine than diamonds adn more valuable, so we are told; and before you can run back here again to look, the petals have begin to drop and the leaves to yellow. Look, they sag, they fall. Are they the more wonderful because they live such a short time.”

“We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it--we're slow learners, we women--we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production.”

“It's hard to find evil in this world,' said the Witch. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.”

“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.”

“The cunning old cow, thought Melena. She is trying that rarest of strategies, telling the truth, and making it sound plausible.”

“You mean you indulged in adultery and you dont' even have the benefit of a good saucy memory about it.”

“People who claim they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. It’s the people who claim that they’re good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of”

“Forgive us our trespasses,” says Margarethe, “and get out of our way.”

“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.”

“All these last months he had begun to talk about Sarima and the family as if they were ghosts, hiding just around the curve of the spiral staircase in the tower, suppressing giggles at this long, long game of hide-and-seek.”

“The storm dropped a house on her head.”

“But the pinkness and whiteness of underskirts and camisoles, the frilliness of foundation garments, the rustle about the bustle and the fuss about the bust.”

“Why lock yourself in your own cage when someone is handing you a key?”

“She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go.”

“I learned failure early and mastered it.”

“You confuse not speaking with not listening.”

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

“What's big, thick, makes the earth move, and wants to have its way with you?" "I don't know, but can you introduce me?”

“The cave of Ozma has been discovered, and she is to come back and rule our Oz, and the idiotic Scarecrow can go stuff himself. Hah!Good one: a Scarecrow stuffing himself.”

“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?”

“The unvisited grannies, in stone houses by the wheat field, can't remember their husbands or children. They worry their hands, though, hands that could do with a rinsing. The grannies think:We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn't as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness.”

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

“The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.”

“Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience. ”

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

“...I dabble in causes and effects.”

“...the reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.”

“Or is it just that the world upwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you're ready to see it anew?”

“So she listened hard. And she began to evolve, because stories work their magic that way. They build conviction and erode conviction in equal measure.”

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

“It's just that 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.”

“...looking at him makes her feel like laughing all over - as if she could laugh not just with her mouth but with her eyes, her heart, her very limbs.”

“The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.”

“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 inferiority of others.”

“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.”

“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.”

“People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.”

“Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.”

“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?”

“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.”

“A notion of character, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives. They woke up, were they lucky enough to have consciousness, in the act of doing something they already knew how to do…”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope.They say I did, at least, and so does he.And who am I to make of the Pope a liar,And who is he to make a liar of me?”