Top 300 Gregory Maguire Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “It’s more convenient to have a hero waiting in the wings than to endure a blowhard standing in the spotlight.”

— Gregory Maguire

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

— Gregory Maguire

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “I just like to think about what I’m reading. Don’t you?” “I don’t read very well. So I don’t think I think very well either.” Galinda smiled. “I dress to kill, though.”

— Gregory Maguire

260. “Little Miss Muffet and Mary Contrary, Found in a garden a spider most scary: It stung them and hung them to save them for dinner, A fate that awaits the conventional sinner.”

— Gregory Maguire

261. “Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn’t ironic in the end.”

— Gregory Maguire

262. “You lost your copper as well as your faith in wishes, and prayers.”

— Gregory Maguire

263. “The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.”

— Gregory Maguire

264. “Only, sometimes, in the text of a book here and there, we tap the page with a finger and say, “This is what my lost days were like. Something like this.”

— Gregory Maguire

265. “Such silly things, children – and so embarrassing – because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something.”

— Gregory Maguire

266. “No, my girl, you know nothing of how we women are imprisoned in our lives, but there are ways to determine the sentence we must serve.”

— Gregory Maguire

267. “For one short wet month early in the next year the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water frothing at the hedges bubbling at the roadside splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower.”

— Gregory Maguire

268. “Those who are roped into bed at night often fall into delusions of flight.”

— Gregory Maguire

269. “Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.”

— Gregory Maguire

270. “Of course. You get everything from books.”

— Gregory Maguire

271. “Being vulnerable to desolation also arises from being unable to picture a set of choices with which to change your lot in life.”

— Gregory Maguire

272. “Whispering can disguise the shape of syllables, but not of mood.”

— Gregory Maguire

273. “No one is exempt from grief.”

— Gregory Maguire

274. “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

275. “There is a limit to the nonsense even a dream can attempt.”

— Gregory Maguire

276. “Now we’d help her if we could. We can’t. So we’re helping you. That’s all that most of us who are not Tsars or witches can manage to do.”

— Gregory Maguire

277. “I’m a priest, I know better than most when a lie is permitted.”

— Gregory Maguire

278. “Everything changes you, and you change everything.”

— Gregory Maguire

279. “Children surrender nothing when faced with the world: it is the world that gives up, over and over again. By so giving up, of course, it renews itself – that is the secret. Dying in order to live, that sort of thing.”

— Gregory Maguire

280. “It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however, that shortly thereafter, the Wizard absconded from the Palace. He left in the way he had first arrived – a hot-air balloon – just a few hours before seditious ministers were to lead a Palace revolt and to hold an execution without trial.”

— Gregory Maguire

281. “You charming idiot.”

— Gregory Maguire

282. “If the unlettered farmers of Munchkinland and the factory workers of Gillikin believe that their fate is being determined by how the Time Dragon dreams them up, they don’t need to bother to take responsibility for their actions or for changing their class and station in life.”

— Gregory Maguire

283. “I like to think Im a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions.”

— Gregory Maguire

284. “I actually prefer female voices to listen to, mostly, but among the male singers whose voices I like are Jeff Buckley, Art Garfunkel, that sort of voice. Contemporary crooners rather than rockers.”

— Gregory Maguire

285. “Oh, the accident necessary to fiction!”

— Gregory Maguire

286. “The family was still hard-pressed for money, and dreamed of savory treats to eat, but they had the warmth of one another, and enough on which to live, and in most parts of the world that is called plenty.”

— Gregory Maguire

287. “That’s the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?”

— Gregory Maguire

288. “Doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction.”

— Gregory Maguire

289. “One never knows how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her – is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is the very least question of definitions.”

— Gregory Maguire

290. “But what is character? How solid? We cut our hair, we shave our beards, we lose a limb. We remain ourselves. In dreams, however, we swap identities licentiously. We sabotage the structures of our character without a thought.”

— Gregory Maguire

291. “Chopin’s theme, a simple descending descant the first time round, articulated itself in the repeat with nuanced embellishment. It was music remembering itself. It meant something different, something more, to hear those simple phrases repeated so soon, qualified by chromatic variations. Clarifications. Not redundancy, but a hypothesis about how consolation works. A second chance at getting it. A second chance at life.”

— Gregory Maguire

292. “There was no apology for the way the world worked. Only accommodation to it, while at the same time committing – somehow – not to give up.”

— Gregory Maguire

293. “She was a sour-sass soul with a rubbery face.”

— Gregory Maguire

294. “After all is said and done,” said the Dormouse, “there is nothing to be done. Or said.”

— Gregory Maguire

295. “Gossip is instructive,” said the Wizard. “It tells which way the wind is blowing.”

— Gregory Maguire

296. “I never use the words “humanist” or “humanitarian”, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.”

— Gregory Maguire

297. “It’s been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.”

— Gregory Maguire

298. “Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes our lives less miserable so that we might be more kind – well, then, let’s have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories. We are a sorry tribe of beasts. We need all the help we can get.”

— Gregory Maguire

299. “When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.”

— Gregory Maguire

300. “It’s my belief that our lives are stolen from us. Ornamented with pinnate leaves and colored frills, we exist only as a consolation for others. I don’t feel fulfilled. Indeed, some days I scarcely feel at all.”

— Gregory Maguire