Top 300 Gregory Maguire Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I do not deny that you overwhelm me with your beauty. You are the moon in the season of shadow light; you are the fruit of the candlewood tree; you are the phoenix in circles of flight – .”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

104. “So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.”

— Gregory Maguire

105. “It’s the only condition I know. Bitter Love, Loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It’s where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.”

— Gregory Maguire

106. “We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

108. “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

109. “A little bird told me,” said the Lion.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

111. “Or is it just that the world upwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you’re ready to see it anew?”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

113. “He knew about being alone. The weather was always cold there.”

— Gregory Maguire

114. “There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one’s.”

— Gregory Maguire

115. “Being born with a talent or an inclination for goodness is the aberration.”

— Gregory Maguire

116. “Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

118. “Tarde o temprano, a todos nos alcanza el rayo.”

— Gregory Maguire

119. “A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.”

— Gregory Maguire

120. “A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him -so why bother?- but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible.”

— Gregory Maguire

121. “Everyone dies. It’s a question of where and how, that’s all.”

— Gregory Maguire

122. “Some realities are too onerous to be borne by nations, let alone by children.”

— Gregory Maguire

123. “And in the cave there lived a wicked old witch. Did she ever some out? Not yet.”

— Gregory Maguire

124. “If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.”

— Gregory Maguire

125. “I don’t like work like that. I am the silent partner. I work through events, I live on the sidelines, I dabble in causes and effects, I watch how the misbegotten creatures of this world live their lives.”

— Gregory Maguire

126. “Her sister’s shoes. They sparkeled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkeled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood and thorny stars.”

— Gregory Maguire

127. “How poetic you are,” she said. “I’ve a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.”

— Gregory Maguire

128. “Lucrezia Borgia couldn’t be moved by the sentiment, nor could she forgive the insult. Old woman. Old.”

— Gregory Maguire

129. “Don’t wish,“said Rain, “don’t start. Wishing only...”

— Gregory Maguire

130. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

131. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

132. “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

133. “If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, that might be the best way to die.”

— Gregory Maguire

134. “Evil is moral at it heart. The selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

136. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

137. “She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet.”

— Gregory Maguire

138. “Not everyone can fly by bubble !”

— Gregory Maguire

139. “Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don’t forget we loved it when we were alive.”

— Gregory Maguire

140. “The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time.”

— Gregory Maguire

141. “I’m no pawn,” said Glinda. “I take all the credit in the world for my own foolishness. Good gracious, dear, all of life is a spell. You know that. But you do have some choice.”

— Gregory Maguire

142. “She wondered, faintly, if it was immoral to raise children in the habit of hope. Was it not, in the end, all the harder for them to adjust to the reality of how the world worked?”

— Gregory Maguire

143. “History is a long time in the making.”

— Gregory Maguire

144. “Lost is not an address, it’s not permission to fail, it’s not an excuse.”

— Gregory Maguire

145. “The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eyes, and she who centers herself in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, distinction.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

147. “No, she wasn’t losing language. She was choking on it.”

— Gregory Maguire

148. “Oh, everything is gorgeous once it’s gone.”

— Gregory Maguire

149. “Every child makes its peace with abandonment. That’s called growing up.”

— Gregory Maguire

150. “Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling porcupine,” she crooned. “Little critters fried like fritters come out crunchy and divine.”

— Gregory Maguire