Top 300 Gregory Maguire Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 7

151. “We are an experiment in situation ethics set by the unnamed god.”

— Gregory Maguire

152. “Yes, I’m nervous. You’ll find in time most people are. They simply learn better how to disguise it, and sometimes, if they’re wise, how to use their anxiety to serve the public good.”

— Gregory Maguire

153. “What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get – the more specificity you harvest – the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm.”

— Gregory Maguire

154. “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

155. “Sooner or later we grow into deserving our own deaths, somehow.”

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

— Gregory Maguire

158. “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

159. “Well, your opinion is as good as hers, I think,” said Elphaba. “That’s the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?”

— Gregory Maguire

160. “All these last months he had begun to talk about Sarima and the family as if they were ghosts, hiding just around the curve of the spiral staircase in the tower, suppressing giggles at this long, long game of hide-and-seek.”

— Gregory Maguire

161. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

169. “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

170. “How could anyone live without flying?”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

172. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “Animals in pens have lots of time to develop theories”, said the Cow, “I’ve heard more than one clever creature draw a connection between the rise of tiktokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labour. We weren’t beasts of burden, but we were good reliable labourers. If we were made redundant in the workforce, it was only a matter of time before we’d be socially redundant too.”

— Gregory Maguire

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

188. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

190. “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

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. “Those born dull remain dull.”

— Gregory Maguire

193. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

195. “In the end, all disguises must drop.”

— Gregory Maguire

196. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

198. “In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.”

— Gregory Maguire

199. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire