Top 300 Gregory Maguire Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.”

— Gregory Maguire

52. “For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.”

— Gregory Maguire

53. “If you’re ever in doubt, throw a pepper in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don’t trust in anything.”

— Gregory Maguire

54. “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

55. “And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the side stepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever.”

— Gregory Maguire

56. “Even God used silence as a strategy.”

— Gregory Maguire

57. “She watched the sun bleed water out of the icicle. Warm and cold working together to make an icicle. Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.”

— Gregory Maguire

58. “She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands-as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her own way.”

— Gregory Maguire

59. “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

60. “Oh now that’s a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future.”

— Gregory Maguire

61. “You confuse not speaking with not listening.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

63. “Why lock yourself in your own cage when someone is handing you a key?”

— Gregory Maguire

64. “Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That’s what makes it mystery.”

— Gregory Maguire

65. “Was it an accident that I saw Fiyero, I wondered, looking at the manager with new eyes, or is it just that world unwraps itself to you again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew?”

— Gregory Maguire

66. “He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little.”

— Gregory Maguire

67. “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

68. “There may be no city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.”

— Gregory Maguire

69. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

70. “I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing.”

— Gregory Maguire

71. “Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?”

— Gregory Maguire

72. “Not old enough to feel like an adult, really, but old enough to look like one, and to know the distinction between being carefree and careless.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

74. “That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness-and life isn’t the same now. It’s wonderful, but it isn’t the same.”

— Gregory Maguire

75. “I shall pray for your soul,? promised Nessarose. I shall wait for your shoes,? Elphie answered.”

— Gregory Maguire

76. “The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

78. “When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis, those who are the most themselves are the victims.”

— Gregory Maguire

79. “It’s the endlessly thinking about yourself that causes such heart shame.”

— Gregory Maguire

80. “In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realize it is far more common for men to turn into rats.”

— Gregory Maguire

81. “In my raveling thoughts I flew away, as if my spirit were nestled in the breast feathers of some passing hornbill or waxwing.”

— Gregory Maguire

82. “Perhaps every accidental cluster of people has a short period of grace, in between an initial shyness and prejudice on the one hand and eventual repugnance and betrayal on the other.”

— Gregory Maguire

83. “They’d never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they’d been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.”

— Gregory Maguire

84. “Little critters fried like fritters come out crunchy and divine.”

— Gregory Maguire

85. “At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change.”

— Gregory Maguire

86. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

87. “Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through. To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

89. “And it’s a cold place the world, especially when warmed by arsen.”

— Gregory Maguire

90. “So Oxford, at its inception a huddle of theologicians and divines, grew into a city of dreams, and much good may come of that. Little surprise that Middle-earth and Narnia were both discovered here.”

— Gregory Maguire

91. “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

92. “That’s what misbehavior is all about, just a little extra loving being asked for.”

— Gregory Maguire

93. “The storm dropped a house on her head.”

— Gregory Maguire

94. “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?”

— Gregory Maguire

95. “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

96. “In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.”

— Gregory Maguire

97. “But to be most effective, the faces of the children would need to be painted in a blur, the way all children’s faces truly are. For they blur as they run; they blur as they grow and change so fast; and they blur to keep us from loving them too deeply, for their protection, and also for ours.”

— Gregory Maguire

98. “Your life story is really about how the hands of history caught you up, played with you, and you with them. History plays for keeps; individuals play for time. When.”

— Gregory Maguire

99. “She would emerge. She always had before. The punishing political climate of Oz had beat her down, dried her up, tossed her away – like a seedling she had drifted, apparently too desiccated ever to take root. But surely the curse was on the land of Oz, not on her. Though Oz had given her a twisted life, hadn’t it also made her capable?”

— Gregory Maguire

100. “The world was floods above and fire below.”

— Gregory Maguire