Quotes from Gregory Maguire

Winter still comes after autumn though you may have died over the summer.

Marmalade has to make its own way in life, like the rest of us, she thought.

One day he would finish the job of dying he'd begun in childhood/

When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil, and maybe splits apart and multiplies.

No doubt Noah offered his wife that olive branch. Forty days in a boat with those animals to clean up after? A peace offering likely all that stood between their marriage and bloody murder.

I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness, she said.

Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.

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.

The boy does well enough, said Vicente. A goose does not ask much of life, after all. No, she admitted. Those who ask much are more likely disappointed. We should all be as simple as the goose.

We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.

Aren't these the finest treasures? Each one springs up, and becomes more red than rubies, more fine than diamonds adn more valuable, so we are told; and before you can run back here again to look, the petals have begin to drop and the leaves to yellow. Look, they sag, they fall. Are they the more wonderful because they live such a short time.

But I must pay attention now, she thinks, because what other choice is there? Maybe when I die my soul will fly to meet God, but when that time comes I won't have the use of clever hands, nor the burden of an ugly face; hands and face will be planted like bulbs in the soil, while only the bloom of the spirit emerges elsewhere. So let my hands and my face make their way in the world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.

How truly novel. The emotional life of furniture. I never.

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

I was quite a looker in my time, she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know she must be hideous? Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?

What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.

Ravens aren't usually nocturnal, but hunger can be.

The surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass.

How children love the broken thing! And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.

That's the beginning of heroism, the decision to try.

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.

The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness... Women are weaker, but their weakness is full of cunning and an equally rigid moral certainty. Since their arena is smaller, their capacity for real damage is less alarming.

A mother to a reckless, feckless, one-off of a child—but what child isn't?

What a world I've come up through, said Liir to himself. Oh, what a world, what a world.