Quotes from Gregory Maguire

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.

Do good though, will you? She blinked brightly at the green girl. If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me?

It's the work that's important, not the individual who does it.

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

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.

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

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.

Everyone has a right to love the land that gave them the things they need to live. It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think... that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to allow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful too.

He had forgotten how convincing the world could look, how sure of itself: its outlines and edges; it's gradations, recessions, protrusions; it's startling and vulgar colors.

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?

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

Not old enough to feel like an adult , really, but old enough to look like one, and to know the distinction between being carefree and careless.

I do not deny that you overwhelm me with your beauty. You are the moon in the season of shadow light; you are the fruit of the candlewood tree; you are the phoenix in circles of flight --.

You mean you indulged in adultery and you dont' even have the benefit of a good saucy memory about it.

What will I do if I find myself with a heart? Lose it constantly, I imagine.

Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are.

We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out.

In her time Nor Tigelaar had faced insurrectionists and collaborationists and war profiteers. She'd endured abduction and prison and self-mutilation. She'd sold herself in sex not for cash but for military information that might come in handy to the resistance, and in so doing she'd come across a rum variety of human types.

The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again. Everything was not merely relative, it was--how to put it? --relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.

Within a few moments the last of day became the first of night, a magic as peculiar and welcome as any other.

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.

To look into the mirror is to see the future, in blood and rubies.

Liir held Chistery in his lap and sobbed into his scalp. Chistery said, Well, we'll wail while woe'll wheel, and he cried along with Liir.

It is very difficult to make one's way in this world without being wicked at one time or another, when the world's way is so wicked to begin with.