Top 300 Gregory Maguire Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “It isn’t whether you do it well or ill, it’s that you do it all.”

— Gregory Maguire

202. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

205. “She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she...”

— Gregory Maguire

206. “I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.”

— Gregory Maguire

207. “To consider what other people might say is hardly a good reason to take action or to defer it. You have your own life to live, Iris, and at its end, the only opinion that amounts to anything is that which God bestows.”

— Gregory Maguire

208. “Perplexity isn’t as noble as conviction, but perhaps more good is done in the name of muddling through uncertainty than is done hacking away with the righteous sword of self-confidence.”

— Gregory Maguire

209. “Such silly things, children – and so embarrassing – because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

211. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

215. “Don’t take the advice of anyone you meet here. We’re all mad.”

— Gregory Maguire

216. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

217. “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

218. “Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they’ve imagined us.”

— Gregory Maguire

219. “The moon passed overhead in its path from the Vinkus, and she felt its accusatory spotlight, and moved back from the tall windows.”

— Gregory Maguire

220. “Happiness now sometimes meant turning away from what one remembered of earlier, better happiness.”

— Gregory Maguire

221. “Ah, the inner eye blinks, and the spirit trembles, at the dangerous cost of seeing one’s self as one is.”

— Gregory Maguire

222. “She found her regard for Mr. Winter turning to something like suspicion – though notice how often we lower suspicion upon others to avoid putting ourselves under scrutiny. Now.”

— Gregory Maguire

223. “I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.”

— Gregory Maguire

224. “There were more ways to live than the ones given by one’s superiors.”

— Gregory Maguire

225. “She added, perhaps to herself, “You have to become old and ugly before anyone listens to you, and then they don’t, because you’re ugly and old.”

— Gregory Maguire

226. “It was deliciously pagan.”

— Gregory Maguire

227. “It was hard to tell what her weapons were, except for that sort of inane good sense and emotional honesty.”

— Gregory Maguire

228. “I do love to sing. Had I a longer set of thigh bones and a sweeter voice, I should have loved to be a performer.”

— Gregory Maguire

229. “As for dreams, they are powered by urgent desire, even if that desire is only to escape the quotidian.”

— Gregory Maguire

230. “Perhaps he just didn’t have the feeling for faith. It seemed to be a kind of language, one whose gnarled syntax needed to be heard from birth, or it remained forever unintelligible. But he wished he had a faith now, some scrap for something: for elphaba was dead, and to act as if the world were no more changed than if some branch of a tree had snapped off- well, it didn’t seem right.”

— Gregory Maguire

231. “Behind every aspect of the world is another aspect of the world.”

— Gregory Maguire

232. “Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met.”

— Gregory Maguire

233. “Galinda didn’t often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow.”

— Gregory Maguire

234. “When Sister Saint Aelphaba neither confirmed nor denied this plan, Oatsie began to understand why the payment to take the green maunt away had been more than generous.”

— Gregory Maguire

235. “The fatal day rarely announces itself, but comes disguised as midsummer. Our private lives are like a colony of worlds expanding, contracting, breathing universal air into separate knowledges. Or like several packs of cards shuffled together by an expert anonymous hand, and dealt out in a random, amused or even hostile way.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

237. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

238. “All of life hinges on what one does next, until finally one makes the wrong choice.”

— Gregory Maguire

239. “Happy endings are still endings.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

241. “They conducted their love affair in the room above the abandoned corn exchange as the autumn weather came lop-leggedly in from the east: now a warm day, now a sunny one, now four days of cold winds and thin rain.”

— Gregory Maguire

242. “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.”

— Gregory Maguire

243. “I learned failure early and mastered it.”

— Gregory Maguire

244. “It’s more convenient to have a hero waiting in the wings than to endure a blowhard standing in the spotlight.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

246. “The real thing about evil,” said the Witch at the doorway, “isn’t any of what you said. You figure out one side of it – the human side, say – and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It’s like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.”

— Gregory Maguire

247. “What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.”

— Gregory Maguire

248. “The alien girl – she called herself Dorothy – was by virtue of her survival elevated to living sainthood. The dog was merely annoying.”

— Gregory Maguire

249. “When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.”

— Gregory Maguire

250. “And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.”

— Gregory Maguire