Gregory Maguire Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

...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.

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.

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.

The storm dropped a house on her head.

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.

Doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction.

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 care as much as I can, but I don’t spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve.

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.

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?

And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

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

To grow a melody?" "You can't grow a melody on purpose, ” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental.

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.

Come what may and hell to pay.

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

What will I do if I find myself with a heart?" "Lose it constantly, I imagine.

But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.

I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.

A world emerging, daily, out of nothing, a world that we trust to resemble what we've seen previously. We should know better.

Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.

What is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it.

At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change.

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

It isn't hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.

One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her- is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?

And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations.

You leave home, I have learned, counting the trip day by day. If you ever get to return, you count the trip miracle by miracle.

Do good though, will you?" She blinked brightly at the green girl. "If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me?

Was it an accident... or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew?

By so giving up, of course, it renews itself- that is the secret

Isn't that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger--

We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out.

Night is brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.

Her head had turned quickly away...Not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence.

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

This is what fun is like, " said Rain, almost to herself.

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 wan

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