Gregory Maguire

“Approval is overrated. Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it.”

“Liir didn’t know what to say to that; he wasn’t sure what husbandry was.“Animal husbandry,” Trism explained, though in the noise of the bar, Liir couldn’t tell if he said Animal or animal, the sentient or the nonsentient creature.“Training for military uses,” said Trism at last. “Are you slow, or are you falling in love with me?"”

“It's over the garden wall and we're going to see the Wizard, come what may and hell to pay.-Elphaba”

“Always the bridesmaid , never the bride." Always the godfather, never the god".”

“I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.”

“Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn't rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled,...it is Art.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I shall pray for your soul,' promised Nessarose.I shall wait for your shoes,' Elphie answered.”

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

“If the unlettered farmers of Munchkinland and the factory workers of Gillikin believe that their fate is being determined by how the Time Dragon dreams them up, they don't need to bother to take responsibility for their actions or for changing their class and station in life.”

“The surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass.”

“You're fun to look at," decided Galinda.Boq's face fell. "Fun?" he said.I'd give a lot to achieve fun," Elphaba said. "The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they're usually referring to digestion-”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction.”

“How easily Neverland is corrupted into the deserted island of Lord of the Flies. How quickly Tinkerbell regresses to being one of the flies pestering the gouged eye sockets of the pig that the lost boys butcher.”

“She's sent the crows out to blind the guests coming for dinner!"What?"She's BLINDING THE GUESTS COMING FOR DINNER!"Well, that's one way to avoid having to dust, I suppose.”

“There were a great many jokes about the disaster (house falling on and killing Wicked Witch of the East), naturally. "You can't hide from desinty, that house had her name on it" "That Nessarose, she was giving such a good speech about religious lessons, she really brought down the house!" "Everybody needs to grow up and leave home sometimes, but sometimes HOME DOESN'T LIKE IT." "What's the different between a shooting star and a falling house?" "One which is propitious grants delicious wishes, the other which is vicious squishes witches." "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?”

“So he stalked her again. Love makes hunters of us all.”

“...No opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.”

“For one short wet month early in the next year the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water frothing at the hedges bubbling at the roadside splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower ”

“He 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.”

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

“He knew about being alone. The weather was always cold there.”

“... the decades looked on and didn't notice her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn't see revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.”

“When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.”

“Is this the main thing that painters of portraits care about? The person on the verge of becoming someone else?”

“So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.”

“It’s the place of the story, beginning here, in the meadow of late summer flowers, thriving before the Atlantic storms drive wet and winter upon them all.”

“Immortality is a chancy thing; it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is.”

“If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.”

“The colossal might of wickedness: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.”

“Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow.”

“Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish to hell he'd go away.”

“Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. Beautiful in the concept, if we're lucky, but frequently tedious or regrettable as we flesh ourselves out.”

“He lingered at the door, and said, 'The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you want?'...She couldn't say forgiveness, not to Liir. She started to say 'a soldier,' to make fun of his mooning affections over the guys in uniform. But realizing even as she said it that he would be hurt, she caught herself halfway, and in the end what came out of her mouth surprised them both.She said, 'A soul-'He blinked at her.”

“Even God used silence as a strategy.”

“Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing. If one could drown in the grass...it might be the best way to die.”

“What is a spell after all but a way of coaxing syllables together so persuasively that some new word is spelled...some imprecision clarified, some name Named...and some change managed.”

“And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no "after", in the "ever after" of a Witch there is no "happily"; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is-alas, or perhaps thank mercy-no telling. She was dead, dead, and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.”

“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.”

“Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.”

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

“The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.”

“How shallow the words are, really - She is a witch. One might as well say, She is a mother, thinks Iris; that about covers the same terrain, doesn't it?”

“They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.”

“Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven. So you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.”