Quotes from Gregory Maguire

but, being unable to decide yes, she decided no.

What words she had thought to write on the face of the moon were washed away from her as she submerged, trying to disturb no one, nothing. Trying not so much as to interrupt a current, even trying not to shatter into soft-edged platelets the green moon in the reflection. Trying to sidestep having any influence at all, now and till the end of her life.

When Sister Saint Aelphaba neither confirmed nor denied this plan, Oatsie began to understand why the payment to take the green maunt away had been more than generous.

You leave home, I have learned, counting the trip day by day. If you ever get to return, you count the trip miracle by miracle.

There was much to hate in this world, and too much to love.

Tarde o temprano, a todos nos alcanza el rayo.

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.

Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes our lives less miserable so that we might be more kind—well, then, let's have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories. We are a sorry tribe of beasts. We need all the help we can get.

It would have made a nice painting, were someone to choose something as lowly as that to study. Another story, a story written in oils rather than one painted on porcelain. 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.

Night is brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.

Those who are roped into bed at night often fall into delusions of flight.

The family was still hard-pressed for money, and dreamed of savory treats to eat, but they had the warmth of one another, and enough on which to live, and in most parts of the world that is called plenty.

Night-time is being brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.

They conducted their love affair in the room above the abandoned corn exchange as the autumn weather came lop-leggedly in from the east: now a warm day, now a sunny one, now four days of cold winds and thin rain.

He is a boy, just as boys are. A little dull, maybe, but he hasn't had the advantages we've had.' 'Which are?' prompted Glinda. 'Even for a short time,' said Elphaba, 'we had a mother. Giddy, alcoholic, imaginative, uncertain, desperate, brave, stubborn, supportive woman. We had her. Melena.

Children surrender nothing when faced with the world: it is the world that gives up, over and over again. By so giving up, of course, it renews itself—that is the secret. Dying in order to live, that sort of thing.

The horizon was frosted with a greenish smear, as if ranks of campfires from distant tribes had divined the news already and were burning an homage to Elphaba before the sun could set on the day of her death. He could smell her in the collar of the cape, and he wept for the first time.

You'll be all right,' Elphaba said, 'now you're a seasoned traveler. This is just the return leg of a voyage you already know.' She put her face against Glinda's and kissed her. 'Hold out, if you can,' she murmured, and kissed her again. 'Hold out, my sweet.

Aún estaba embadurnada con la sangre del parto y los comienzos acuosos de sus heces de lactante. La llevó a la puerta y la puso bajo la lluvia tibia. Cuando estuvo limpia, vio que era verde.

The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. . . .

Those who sit in the house of grief will someday sit in the garden.

an odor of June mud, backwashed with essence of meadow-grass and a whiff of cow.

What was a miracle but an enchantment conferred for someone's good?