Quotes from Gregory Maguire

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.

Damn the human stomach, this fat betrayor of ideals

In the end, all disguises must drop.

It's been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.

There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments, said Frex.

All these last months he had begun to talk about Sarima and the family as if they were ghosts, hiding just around the curve of the spiral staircase in the tower, suppressing giggles at this long, long game of hide-and-seek.

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

But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don't lie about men, only women.

I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope. They say I did, at least, and so does he. And who am I to make of the Pope a liar, And who is he to make a liar of me?

and Ama Clutch was gone, and the overly subordinate pillowcase took a small spill of human juice from the edge of her slackened mouth.

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.

What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get—the more specificity you harvest—the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm.

this girl who seemed, increasingly, to be interested in learning to read everything except how human beings talked to one another.

They did the best they could. Besides I was hardly a stranger. I had known your grandmother. We were like this. She twined her second and third fingers together as if they might strangle each other.

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.

What's missing from the literature of our species are the stories of the peasants. The filthy illiterate. Those with no firm address, no surname. No one to impress, nothing to lose. But the poor tell stories, too.

Is it only in childhood that we are capable of taking in the whole world? What does it do to us that we briefly have that privilege? And, then, what harm , when the fund of novelty in human experience runs dry?

But to be most effective, the faces of the children would need to be painted in a blur, the way all children's faces truly are. For they blur as they run; they blur as they grow and change so fast; and they blur to keep us from loving them too deeply, for their protection, and also for ours.

One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her-is it ever the right choice?

Furniture! bellowed the witch. Tables, bathtub, the lot of you. It's time to go out in the world and seek your fortunes, if that's your hope. There was a crashing sound as all the furniture went and tried to hide under the bed, and the bed tried to hide under itself.

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.

Liir didn't know what to say to that; he wasn't sure what husbandry was. "Animal husbandry," Trism explained, though in the noise of the bar, Liir couldn't tell if he said Animal or animal, the sentient or the nonsentient creature. "Training for military uses," said Trism at last. "Are you slow, or are you falling in love with me?

I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral, said the Wizard. In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical.