Gregory Maguire Quotations

Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless you're really depressed or something, the person in the mirror generally looks a little more competent, a little more curious, a little more intelligent than you actually feel yourself to be? They often look more interesting and more soulful.

While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon.

I like to think I'm a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions.

I write because I admire the act of rationalization, of seeking clarity in one's understanding of the complexities of life, and I'm bad at it. I'm slow. Writing, which is an arduous and slow process, proceeds at the same rate as my sloth-like mind.

I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.

In a sense, 'Out of Oz' is an examination of how individuals keep going, keep reinventing themselves and their lives, even after life-altering complications have afflicted them.

The story of 'Mirror Mirror' is in many ways a story about evolution. It's about the evolution of a child into an adult. It's about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. It's about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.

My tastes in music tend to favor anything my kids don't like, out of natural antipathy amplified by a sort of malicious glee.

I'm not a writer because I want to make money. I'm a writer because I'm a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories.

I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.

I actually prefer female voices to listen to, mostly, but among the male singers whose voices I like are Jeff Buckley, Art Garfunkel, that sort of voice. Contemporary crooners rather than rockers.

I had written children's books for 14 years before I published 'Wicked.' And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

I was just about to begin writing 'Mirror Mirror', within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.

I'm a comic writer, in some ways, and a comic person when I'm up at a podium, in order to disguise the fact that in my heart I'm disgustingly earnest.

I didn't even realize this at first, but there's almost no central character in any of my 24 books who doesn't have a dead mother or a lost parent.

I do love to sing. Had I a longer set of thigh bones and a sweeter voice, I should have loved to be a performer.

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

My first job was scooping ice cream at Friendly's in Albany, New York. I hated the work, most of my colleagues, and the uniform, and I more or less lost my taste for ice cream permanently.

When I began 'Wicked', I really thought of it entirely as a one-off, as the English say. There was no intention that there should ever be a follow up, because the subtitle was 'The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West'. She was dead and gone, as the book says, at the end.

I thought if this catches on, that would be a sign from God I should move here,

Yes, ... It's called 'Son of a Witch.'

I hate to be obvious," added the Scarecrow, "but you'd have saved yourself a heap of trouble if you weren't too cheap to invest in a leash, Dorothy.

There was much to hate in this world and too much to love.

Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met

Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

You could say that Elphaba brought us together,' said Boq softly. 'I'm closer to her and so I'm closer to you.' Galinda seemed to give up. She leaned her head back on the velvet cushions of the swing and said, 'Boq, you know despite myself I think you're a little sweet. You're a little sweet and you're a little charming and you're a little maddening and you're a little habit-forming.' Boq held his breath. But you're little!' she concluded. 'You're a Munchkin, for god's sake!' He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.

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

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

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

I had written childrens books for 14 years before I published Wicked. And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

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

Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.

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 any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.

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

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

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

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

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.

The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.

I know you don't want to hear this but someone has to say it! You are out of control! I mean they're just shoes... let it go!

No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.

And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.' Did she ever come out?' Not yet.

It was deliciously pagan.

Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

One plus one equals both.

Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.

The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.

Of course. You get everything from books.

Yes, I'm nervous. You'll find in time most people are. They simply learn better how to disguise it, and sometimes, if they're wise, how to use their anxiety to serve the public good.

quoting reminds me there are other people in the world besides only me. And other thoughts besides mine, and other ways of thinking.

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.

Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless youre really depressed or something, the person in the mirror generally looks a little more competent, a little more curious, a little more intelligent than you actually feel yourself to be? They often look more interesting and more soulful.

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...

No," she cried, "no, no, I'm not a harem, I'm not a woman, I'm not a person, no.

She assumes that skill will guide her fingertips, that shapely lines will uncoil out of the pencil the moment she starts. Surely talent is a thing curled deep inside, just waiting to be exercised, and at the slightest invitation it will stretch, shake itself, make itself known? Talent, it seems, is not so insistent.

Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life.

We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn’t as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness

Oh now that's a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future

Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly.

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

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

It isn't whether you do it well or ill, it's that you do it all.

We are loping sequences of chemical conversions, acting ourselves converted. We are twists of genes acting ourselves twisted; we are wicks of burning neuroses acting ourselves wicked. And nothing to be done about it. And nothing to be done about it.

...and he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, little by little by little.

The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

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.

You confuse not speaking with not listening.

at least i'm talkng to myself. instead of giving myself the cold shoulder

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.

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.

It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however, that shortly thereafter, the Wizard absconded from the Palace. He left in the way he had first arrived-- a hot-air balloon-- just a few hours before seditious ministers were to lead a Palace revolt and to hold an execution without trial.

That's what misbehavior is all about, just a little extra loving being asked for.

I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.

...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.

Only he with the hobbled foot fully knows the beauty of running. Only he with the severed ear can apprehend what the sweetest music must sound like. Our ailments complete us.

...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.

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

Forgive us our trespasses," says Margarethe, "and get out of our way.

Skibbereen have a hard time at [math]; the best that the smartest of them can do with adding two plus two is guessing: three plus one. Correct, sort of, but not always useful.

Elena had always felt like the center of her own world - who doesn't? The world arranged itself around her like petals around the stem of a flower. This way the meadows, that way the woodland. Over here, the baryn's estate, out there, the hills that hug the known world close and imply a world at beyond. She could never come up with the edge of a world, because it always kept going on beyond. She moved the center of the world as she walked. The world was balanced on her head.

Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don't forget we loved it when we were alive.

She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.

I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I’d rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.

The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man.

Notice, notice; let noticing take the place of screaming.

To look into the mirror is to see the future, in blood and rubies.

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.

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.

I hate New Year's Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven't yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn't matter.

If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.

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

No one is exempt from grief.