Quotes from Gregory Maguire

When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.

And there the wicked old witch stayed for a good long time... And did she ever come out? ... Not yet.

As years pass, and the abundance of the future is depleted, the crux of old mistakes and the cost of old choices are ever recalibrated. Resentment, the interest in umbrage derived from being wronged, is computed minute by minute, savagely, however you try to ignore it.

In the lives of children, pumpkins can turn into coaches, mice and rats into human beings. When we grow up, we learn that it's far more common for human beings to turn into rats.

I never talk about the end game. He winked at her. I've lived so long without death that I've stopped believing in it.

Is that, in the end - that capacity to hurt - the most essential ingredient for a ruler?

He didn't remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

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.

What no one tells the young is to be careful of their childhoods. The memories from those days are the most compelling paintings in the mind--to which, with nostalgia or dread, you must ever return.

What's big, thick, makes the earth move, and wants to have its way with you? I don't know, but can you introduce me?

Your life story is really about how the hands of history caught you up, played with you, and you with them. History plays for keeps; individuals play for time. When

Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear yet...She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart. But there was more than one way to be smart.

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.

To grow a song, you must plant a note.

Elena had always felt like the center of her own world - who doesn't? The world arranged itself around her like petals around the stem of a flower. This way the meadows, that way the woodland. Over here, the baryn's estate, out there, the hills that hug the known world close and imply a world at beyond. She could never come up with the edge of a world, because it always kept going on beyond. She moved the center of the world as she walked. The world was balanced on her head.

It's heaven to know that it's still possible to run, though she doesn't know what she's running from.

He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little.

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?

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

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

Where shall I say you've gone? She threw an arm about airily. Oh, way up high. Over the rainbow somewhere, I guess.

Every child makes its peace with abandonment. That's called growing up.

Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It's so much like home, and then it holds out on you.

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