Gregory Maguire > Quotes

“People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. It’s the people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of. - Boq (WICKED)”
― Gregory Maguire

“The real thing about evil… you figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“The storm dropped a house on her head.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“A capacity for interiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation to squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hollowness. The syndrome especially plagues anyone who lives behind a mask...A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I know what I know?”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked / Son of a Witch

“Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing -- by dint of ignorance and innocence -- that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Some said the original evil was the vacuum caused by the Fairy Queen Lurline leaving us alone here. When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil and maybe slpits apart and multiplies. So every evil thing is a sign of the absence of deity”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, Lost

“You can endure any sort of prison if you can apprehend a window in the dark.”
― Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

“Everybody needs to grow up and leave home sometimes. But sometimes home doesn't like it.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

“Ah, the inner eye blinks, and the spirit trembles, at the dangerous cost of seeing one's self as one is.”
― Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

“Are you the dart?" he said. "Are you the knife? The fuse?"

She said (though he wasn't convinced): "My deane, my poppet, I am too green to
walk into a public place and do something bad...”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“The world pauses for royalty and deformity alike, and sometimes one can’t tell the difference.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“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…”
― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

“I take all the credit in the world for my own foolishness.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“All paths lead to the same place, and that place is whatever comes next.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“What no one tells the young is to be careful of their childhoods. The memories from those days are the most compelling paintings in the mind--to which, with nostalgia or dread, you must ever return.”
― Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

“...the reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history”
― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

“I believe in the floor. I put it in place and I walk on it. Faith is a floor. If you don't work at making it for yourself, you have nothing to walk on.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“It’s the age of daring. It’s the only time we have. We must live in the present. We are young and alive.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“I've told you before, I don't comprehend religion, although conviction is a concept I'm beginning to get. In any case, someone with a real religious conviction is, I propose, a religious convict, and deserves locking up.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“The cunning old cow, thought Melena. She is trying that rarest of strategies, telling the truth, and making it sound plausible.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Glinda used her glitter beads, and you used your exotic looks and background, but weren't you just doing the same thing, trying to maximize what you had in order to get what you wanted? People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. It's people who claim that they're good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Those times are over and gone, and good riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the tick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Sorrow has a name, and its name is loneliness. Sorrow has a shape, and its shape is absence. Sorrow is a sickness like any other.”
― Gregory Maguire

“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?”
― Gregory Maguire, Lost

“[after discussion about what evil is, a question asked to Elphaba on why she killed Madame Morrible]
"Why did you do it?" asked the hostess with spirit.
The Witch shrugged. "For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West