Quotes from Gregory Maguire

A notion of character, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives.

A certain young scholar of Shiz Right before a philosophy quiz Guzzled splits of champagne So that he could declaim "I drink, and therefore I is.

Your life and times don't drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).

A few trinkets for my sister," she said. "She's like Miss Galinda, she loves the fancy outside of things.

Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them. We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls….

You only seem to read in yourself what you have not.

Old Sophia threw a potato at him. 'Without my fear, I'd be a simpleton,' She called after him. To the women on the platform she said, 'I consider that a potato well spent.

She lived and breathed, Brrr knew, with a high tolerance for detachment - like a lake jellyfish floating in a glass casket, oblivious of japing crowds.

I hate to be obvious," added the Scarecrow, "but you'd have saved yourself a heap of trouble if you weren't too cheap to invest in a leash, Dorothy.

Death comes as a shock even when it is inevitable. The world reasserts itself. It says, I keep going whether you do or not. I am indifferent to your need for constancy, says the world, and my indifference is shown in my own constancy.

You're critical of everyone. Oh, not everyone. Only everybody who's alive as well as most people who are dead. I feel quite neutral about anybody not yet born

But look at that beautiful angel there! Do you really mean to say you don't believe in the Other Land? In an afterlife?' 'Just what we need.' Elphaba snorted as she picked up the tome. 'A post Vale-of-Tears Vale-of-Tears'.

In dreams, time may eddy and distort, but even when it traffics in the past, it does so in the guise of the present moment

Little Miss Muffet and Mary Contrary, Found in a garden a spider most scary: It stung them and hung them to save them for dinner, A fate that awaits the conventional sinner.

Well, that's not poetry, that's propaganda, and not even good propaganda at that.

Most effectively, and gruesomely, the skull of an elephant hung on a rafter, and a bouquet of dried creamy pink roses emerged from the central hole in the hull of its cranium - like the exploding brains of a dying animal, he couldn't help thinking; remembering Elphaba's youthful concerns. Or maybe an homage to the putative magical talents of elephants?

I'm learning there's never a way home, only a way forward,' said Rain.

Ask me no questions and I'll spell you no lies, she said.

Hold on to them both. In time you'll find children the greatest comfort you can imagine. Indeed, they prove to be the only possible distraction from the unanswerable question of why.

She had to turn her head away for an instant, clear her throat, blow her nose. Oh damn, tears, they burn like fire, she cried, suddenly in a fury, and ran for an old blanket to dab her eyes before the salty wetness could run down her cheeks.

I was a tool. My dear father used me - and Nessarose less so, because of her trouble moving about - he used me as an object lesson. Looking as I did, even singing as I can - they trusted him partly as a response to the freakiness of me. If the Unnamed God could love me, how much more responsible it'd be to the unadulterated them.

When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis," she said, "those who are the most themselves are the victims.

Once we really get the full measure of it—we're slow learners, we women—we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production. But men don't dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the death. Ah, we're slow learners, Nanny countered. But they can't learn at all.

Then, abrupt and decisive, the Emerald City rose before them. A city of insistence, of blanket declaration. It made no sense, clotting up the horizon, sprouting like a mirage on the characterless plains of central Oz. Glinda hated it from the moment she saw it. Brash upstart of a city.