Gregory Maguire Quotes

Biography

Type: Novelist

Born: June 9, 1954

Died:

Gregory Maguire is an American novelist. He is the author of "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the Wes"t, "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister", and several dozen other novels for adults and children. Many of Maguire's adult novels are inspired by classic children's stories; Wicked transforms the "Wicked Witch of the Wes"t from L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and its 1939 film adaptation into the misunderstood green-skinned Elphaba Thropp. The blockbuster Broadway musical "Wicked", at its height running nine companies simultaneously around the world, was inspired by Maguire's first adult novel. The musical is the ninth-longest-running play currently staged in London's West End (as of September 2015), and the tenth-longest-running show in Broadway history.

Gregory Maguire Quotes

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

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.

It's the work that's important, not the individual who does it.

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.

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

Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they've imagined us.

The world was floods above and fire below

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.

One never knows 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? It is the very least question of definitions.

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.

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

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.

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?

Of course. You get everything from books.

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.

(from the short story The Honorary Shepherds)...you can't be kicked out of a faith. Faith starts inside your heart and ends up in eternity. All you can be kicked out of is a building, which is the bus stop of faith, sort of, and what's a building?

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

Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-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.

History plays for keeps; individuals play for time.

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

It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.

Oh, mercy, there is nothing monstrously ugly about you. Ruth may be unpleasing, but you are merely plain. If anything, it's my beauty that's monstrous, for it sweeps away any other aspect of my character.

As the first hard drops of rain fell, the Witch caught sight, not of the girl's face, but of the shoes. Her sister's shoes. They sparkled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood, and thorny stars.

The beauty of the day is the only thing that doesn't fade in time. Day after day, such beauty revives itself.

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

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.

But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before.

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.

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

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

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

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

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

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.

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

There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.

Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met

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?

Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.

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

The sun is the biggest metaphor. The sun is the first candle. She can get there by its light.

He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.

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

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

Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties.

Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.

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