Top 227 Quotes & Sayings by Gregory Maguire - Page 3

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.

But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

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

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

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

My job is to protect you, Lady Glinda even if you are loosing your mind.

For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.

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.

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

...but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn't hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.

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.

And it's a cold place the world, especially when warmed by arsen.

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

Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.

No wonder Wonderland isn't funny to read anymore: We live there full time. We need a break from it.

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

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

Don't wish,"said Rain, "don't start. Wishing only...

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

Doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction.

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.

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.

I learned failure early and mastered it.

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.

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.

Why lock yourself in your own cage when someone is handing you a key?

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.

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.

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

In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.

Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle

There were more ways to live than the ones given by one's superiors

No one is exempt from grief.

The storm dropped a house on her head.

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.

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

What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.

In the end, all disguises must drop.

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.

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

It's been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.

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

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.

Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.

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.

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

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

Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?

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.

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.

Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last

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

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls.

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.

She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go.

...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.

Little critters fried like fritters come out crunchy and divine.

...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.

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.