Quotes from Gregory Maguire

What did it say about the movement of time, about what was about to happen, that I could understand the hummingbird spin of human voices?

I'm no pawn, said Glinda. I take all the credit in the world for my own foolishness. good gracious, dear, all of life is a spell. You know that. But you do have some choice.

Talvez a definição de lar seja o local onde você nunca é perdoado, então você sempre vai se encaixar lá, presa pela culpa. E talvez o custo de pertencer a algum lugar valha a pena.

Klara seemed, on the contrary, frequently to be emerging. Not from silence into sociability—something other than that. From herself into herself—as if she had been born bearing multiple veils of Klara, and they were all legitimate. Echt.

Boq returned the smile, warmly. Glinda used her glitter beads, and you used your exotic looks and background, but weren't you just doing the same thing, trying to maximize what you had in order to get what you wanted? People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. He sighed. It's people who claim that they're good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.

Rain spoke as slowly as she could, working her way like a tightrope artist across her thoughts, feeling them an instant before walking the words out.

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. Adults should try it. But frankly, I think it's a miracle that adults can manage to speak to one another at all, and that the entire species doesn't take a universal vow of silence. Some days I wish it would.

He shook his ladle overhead as if summoning the wrath of angel chefs among the stars.

history takes a long time to happen.

If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, it might be the best way to die.

Was it an accident I saw that...or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?

The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominos 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.

All tyrants were harsh, but fire was more ungovernable than most.

Para a alma, cada instante sempre é um minuto mais próximo do julgamento

Your life story is really about how the hands of history caught you up, played with you, and you with them. History plays for keeps. Individuals play for time.

It seems to me the nature of the world is all one thing or all the other. Either there is nothing but coincidence or there is nothing but established fare.

always thought a soul was private, but it appears it can be colonized against your will if you don't watch out.

How many times in a life, he thought, will I lie down in a darkness whose character I cannot imagine, to see what daybreak reveals of my new circumstances? Or is that every day of my life?

The small gesture of charity? Isn't that sort of beauty more beautiful than any other?" "And equally evanescent," says the Master, "for small charities cannot this wicked world amend. But perhaps charity is the kind of beauty that we comprehend the best because we miss it the most.

A fellow needed two names, one for affection and the other for civic duty.

Childhood, which seems endless to children, is the most finite span of moments in the history of a life.

A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking.

Humans are so blind, their eyes on the ground, themselves always at the center. Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.

She was of an age that took other people's lives to be pretty fictions, useful merely for adorning the invisible membrane that contained her own singular and glorious existence.