Gregory Maguire Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

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.

Gregory Maguire
Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.

Gregory Maguire
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
People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

Gregory Maguire
I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.

Gregory Maguire
How deeply bound by cords of family anger we all are[...]None of us breaks free.

Gregory Maguire
The reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.

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

Gregory Maguire
The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.

Gregory Maguire
How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.

Gregory Maguire
We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it—we're slow learners, we women—we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production.

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

Gregory Maguire
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
No one controls your destiny. Even at the very worst - there is always choice.

Gregory Maguire
The answer of course, is that the clock isn't meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.

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
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.

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

Gregory Maguire
When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis, those who are the most themselves are the victims.

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

Gregory Maguire
She's sent the crows out to blind the guests coming for dinner!" What?" She's BLINDING THE GUESTS COMING FOR DINNER!" Well, that's one way to avoid having to dust, I suppose.

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

Gregory Maguire
Speaking uses us up, speeds us up. Without prayer, that act of confession for merely existing, one might live forever and not know it.

Gregory Maguire
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.

Gregory Maguire
Children are wickeder than adults, they have no sense of restraint.

Gregory Maguire
Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.

Gregory Maguire
No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.

Gregory Maguire
That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

Gregory Maguire
All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn't we hear a voice of prophecy,

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

Gregory Maguire