Top 300 Gregory Maguire Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

205. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

220. “Happy endings are still endings.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— 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. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

227. “It was deliciously pagan.”

— Gregory Maguire

228. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

230. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

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

— 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. “What more does one ask of life, really, but to stagger from moment to moment with a reason to wake and wait for the next reason to wake?”

— Gregory Maguire

244. “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

245. “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

246. “It seems there is no shortage of regret among the young – but then, they are young, they make mistakes. They have time to correct them and the courage to admit their failings aloud.”

— Gregory Maguire

247. “The world pauses for royalty and deformity alike, and sometimes one can’t tell the difference.”

— 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. “His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire