Top 300 Gregory Maguire Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “You leave home, I have learned, counting the trip day by day. If you ever get to return, you count the trip miracle by miracle.”

— Gregory Maguire

153. “What’s missing from the literature of our species are the stories of the peasants. The filthy illiterate. Those with no firm address, no surname. No one to impress, nothing to lose. But the poor tell stories, too.”

— Gregory Maguire

154. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

155. “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

156. “The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective.”

— Gregory Maguire

157. “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...”

— Gregory Maguire

158. “It’s the work that’s important, not the individual who does it.”

— Gregory Maguire

159. “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

160. “The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness... Women are weaker, but their weakness is full of cunning and an equally rigid moral certainty. Since their arena is smaller, their capacity for real damage is less alarming.”

— Gregory Maguire

161. “Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last.”

— Gregory Maguire

162. “Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate,” said Elphaba. “See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something?”

— Gregory Maguire

163. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

164. “You might forget a story, but you can never unhear a story.”

— Gregory Maguire

165. “The master is bringing Darwin through to examine lower life-forms, Rhoda. Straighten your spine or you’ll be mistook for a mollusk.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

167. “Stinging words! You re critical of everyone,” observes Iris. “Oh, not everyone,” says Clara in an offhand manner. “Only everybody who’s alive as well as most people who are dead. I feel quite neutral about anybody not yet born.”

— Gregory Maguire

168. “Listen, we’re all trapped in our own lives. You, me, everyone we’ve ever met.”

— Gregory Maguire

169. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

170. “Those born dull remain dull.”

— Gregory Maguire

171. “Old Flossie settle down on the other side of What-the-Dickens and dragged some handiwork out of a sack. She armed herself with two thorns shaped into knitting needles. A wodge of curlicued metallic scrubbing pad supplied the threat. ‘I knit handcuffs as a hobby,’ explained Old Flossie happily, and set to work. ‘Idle hands get up to no good, so I like to be prepared in case I meet up with any idle hands.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

173. “Furniture!” bellowed the witch. “Tables, bathtub, the lot of you. It’s time to go out in the world and seek your fortunes, if that’s your hope.” There was a crashing sound as all the furniture went and tried to hide under the bed, and the bed tried to hide under itself.”

— Gregory Maguire

174. “But the pinkness and whiteness of underskirts and camisoles, the frilliness of foundation garments, the rustle about the bustle and the fuss about the bust.”

— Gregory Maguire

175. “Besides, thought the girl, what miracle didn’t look ridiculous while it was happening? If a miracle was ordinary, it would be like, just, so what?”

— Gregory Maguire

176. “How could anyone live without flying?”

— Gregory Maguire

177. “The surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass.”

— Gregory Maguire

178. “That’s the beginning of heroism, the decision to try.”

— Gregory Maguire

179. “The woman is bad-tempered because she’s terrified.”

— Gregory Maguire

180. “As Solomon said in the Old Book, if two women squabble over which of them is the mother of a certain infant, the way to solve the problem is to cut the baby in half and share the baby in parts.” “That’s revolting.” “Is it? I always wondered if that baby was a colicky brat and both women were really trying to pawn it off on the other one.”

— Gregory Maguire

181. “Her voice is hoarse. She’s caught a catarrh from that dreadful draft.”

— Gregory Maguire

182. “I had written childrens books for 14 years before I published Wicked. And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.”

— Gregory Maguire

183. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

184. “I never write a book unless I can’t help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.”

— Gregory Maguire

185. “Marmalade has to make its own way in life, like the rest of us, she thought.”

— Gregory Maguire

186. “Her head had turned away quickly as she stepped down, not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

188. “He was not so lucky. He hadn’t yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.”

— Gregory Maguire

189. “What good is it being a painter if you can’t paint yourself?”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

191. “If you’re ever dragged from your chambers at midnight, blindfolded and gagged, without being told whether you’re off to a firing squad or a surprise birthday party, you’ll find that you turn and return to that pivotal moment.”

— Gregory Maguire

192. “As an old friend of mine once said when I brought him some interesting brownies, ‘You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes,’” she replied. “Haven’t you read your Maimonides?”

— Gregory Maguire

193. “One doesn’t know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one’s life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime.”

— Gregory Maguire

194. “The cunning old cow, thought Melena. She is trying that rarest of strategies, telling the truth, and making it sound plausible.”

— Gregory Maguire

195. “The years peeled slowly off, one by one, or perhaps dozens at a time.”

— Gregory Maguire

196. “To consider what other people might say is hardly a good reason to take action or defer it.”

— Gregory Maguire

197. “The colossal might of wickedness: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.”

— Gregory Maguire

198. “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

199. “Day after day in the season of disaster, it can be hard to recognize a chance in fortune when it comes.”

— Gregory Maguire

200. “You know our Alice. She plays hide-and-seek but sometimes forgets to ask someone to look for her.”

— Gregory Maguire