Quotes from Gregory Maguire

Just follow that one road the whole time!... I hope they don't get lost, I'm so bad at giving directions.

That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness-and life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same.

...No opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.

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

And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no after, in the ever after of a Witch there is no happily; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is-alas, or perhaps thank mercy-no telling. She was dead, dead, and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.

In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.

They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.

Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.

I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.

The answer of course, is that the clock isn't meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.

It's the only condition I know. Bitter Love, Loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.

If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.

It's unbecoming, she agreed. A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.

Always the bridesmaid , never the bride. Always the godfather, never the god.

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.

The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.

But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him Yero, my hero, and that melted his heart.

Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.

Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on - or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense

A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him -so why bother?- but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible.

It's the endlessly thinking about yourself that causes such heart shame.

Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow.

Approval is overrated. Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it.