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

“Your transparency is just another one of your disguises, isn't it?”

“[Puggles] "What population signs on willingly for slavery?""You mean other than wives?" [Glinda]”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“. . . this girl who seemed, increasingly, to be interested in learning to read everything except how human beings talked to one another.”