Gregory Maguire > Quotes

“They had ganged up on her, in the claustrophobic, loving way of families, and she wanted no more of it. 7”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fly

“Take care of yourself and beware high connections with bastards, because when the revolution comes there won’t be mercy for toadying ass-lickers.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fly

“Mind your way forward and find your way back,”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“Behind Sarima’s back they called the woman living in the cobbleshed Auntie Witch, echoing the old legends of Kumbricia, which were viler—and more persistent—in the Kells than elsewhere in Oz.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fly

“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fly

“In dreams, time may eddy and distort, but even when it traffics in the past, it does so in the guise of the present moment”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“A foot kicked him square between the buttocks and his bowels released.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fly

“It was the possibility of hope that mattered, he knew.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“Recitatives about structure, about color, about the basic shapes of organic life.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fly

“To kill it was the kindest course of action. The question was how.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fly

“A certain young scholar of Shiz Right before a philosophy quiz Guzzled splits of champagne So that he could declaim “I drink, and therefore I is.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get – the more specificity you harvest – the more precious becomes every ounce and spam. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Igo, the sick old man, quoted Oziad, and reminded them all of how creation worked: the Dragon of Time created the sun and the moon, and Lurline cursed them and said that their children wouldn't know their own parents, and then the Kumbric Witch came along and the flood, the battle, the spilling of evil in the world.
Oatsie Manglehand disagreed. She said, "You old fools, the Oziad is just a frilly, romantic poem of older, harsher legends. What lives in folk memory is truer than how some artsy poet says it. In folk memory veil always predates good."
"Can this be true?" asked Igo, with interest.
"Surely there is a handful of nursery marchen that start, 'Once in the middle of a forest lived an old witch' or 'The devil was out walking one day and met a child,'" said Oatsie, who was showing that she had some education as well as grit. "To the grim poor there need be no pour quoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns ho 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? It is at the very least a question of definitions.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments,”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fly

“You scared the boys. They thought you were hanging the leaves back on the tree.”
“I’ve tried that. They don’t stay.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Your name is Rain, isn’t it? Rain slips in the cracks and slides through the seams. You can do it? Can’t you?”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“The wild forests of his youth—perhaps they no longer existed. The world was too strictly regulated now. The idea of being able to find his way back to that waldhütte where he had been raised—to the extent he had been raised—was as impossible as Nastaran’s need to return to her lost childhood in Persia. It couldn’t happen.
Idle thoughts for a tedious journey. No value could attach to revisiting youth, even if he could manage it somehow.
Still, the notion returned, and he had to throw it down repeatedly, like bread crumbs in some old tale—hoping the wild thrushes would eat them up. Despite the romantic stories that had become so popular—even Felix’s little boys adored the sweetened renditions of Grimm as served up by stern Frau Gouvernante—sometimes one wandered into the woods because the ominous woods were safer than home was.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“Tribal mothers always tell their children that there are two kinds of anger: hot and cold. Boys and girls experience both, but as they grow up the angers separate according to the sex. Boys need hot anger to survive. They need the inclination to fight, the drive to sink the knife into the flesh, the energy and initiative of fury. It’s a requirement of hunting, of defense, of pride. Maybe of sex, too.” “Yes, I know,” said Elphaba, remembering. Sarima blushed and looked unhappy, and continued. “And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the sidestepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever. It’s the compensation for a more limited scope in the world. Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on—or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fly

“And, once the innocence of childhood is lost, no adolescent has ever regained it.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Brides of Maracoor

“Remember—the morning is always brightest after the moonless night.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Until we’re done, we don’t know when the middle might be.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Memory is part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our heart pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work, too: it keeps us who we are. It is the influence that keeps us from flying off into separate pieces like”—she looked around—“like this peel of orange, and that clutch of pips.”
― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

“Whine, you fiend,” said the crone, “it’s your first job.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“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-”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“In a fashion—without any way to confirm it, of course—she had always felt as capable of hot anger as any man. But to be successful, one would need access to both sorts . . .”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fly

“_ Горе — то неуникний підсумок нашого життя, але ми все одно знову і знову народжуємо дітей. _”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“I know Oz, now," she said, and in the carving of the lintel she found that common ideogram, a Z circled with an O. "Usually letters don't hide inside each other," she told Glinda firmly. "No, that's true. In Oz, I suppose, something is always hiding...”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“place,”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“Dreams are not of the mortal world.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker