Quotes from Gregory Maguire

Every choice brings wisdom in its wake. If you got to have the wisdom first, it wouldn't be a choice - just policy. pg. 504

History plays for keeps; individuals play for time.

I need some advice I can use. Advice? Don't use your energies fretting. The morning is wiser than the night, my ducky. The train will be back in the station by dawn. If it's not, you're welcome to starve with the rest of us. But don't worry. If it gets too much for you, just outside this cottage is a convenient well. A more efficient method to drown yourself is hard to find. Splish splash.

So young, he knew nothing about aerodynamics, except how the heart could lift and lift.

I've never met a Quadling before, she said, too loudly, too brightly. The months of solitude had made her forget her manners. My family would never have Quadlings in to dine - not that there were many, or even any for all I know, in the farmlands around my family's estate. The stories make out that Quadlings were sneaky and incapable of telling the truth. How can a Quadling to answer such a charge if a Quadling is given always to lie? He smiled at her.

The vagabond human spirit requires a chart of possibilities in order to keep putting one foot in front of another, keep licensing the next heartbeat after the previous.

Your name is Rain, isn't it? Rain slips in the cracks and slides through the seams. You can do it? Can't you?

Even a clock has teeth and time has a bite all of its own.

Everybody has to rescue themselves.

El cuerpo pide disculpas al alma por sus errores, y el alma pide perdón al cuerpo por ocuparlo sin haber sido invitada.

I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, buy I don't know the way out.

I have always felt like a pawn... My skin color's been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life's work of my own, I haven't found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that.

Now he was the minister and she the sinner, an arrangement she did not particularly enjoy.

Alice less winsome than weird, and treated Lydia like a Cerberus

Everybody's on your side until they need something from you.

We are only missionaries for the world, after all, and when our work is done we really don't exist. Do we? Can it be said for anyone?

But all life is mystery, and death is a sister ot life, and so also mystery.

And there the wicked old Witch stayed for a good long time. And did she ever come out? Not yet.

Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth.

Perhaps our time here is limited, said Frex, sighing with contentment and clasping his arms behind his head - the typical male response to happiness, thought Melena: to predict its demise.

Oh, wary, well, I'm wary of the water I drink, it might be poisoned," said Glinda. "That doesn't mean I stop drinking water.

If we forgo matters of right and wrong on a human scale, we invite disaster in every door and window and via every mountain pass and harbor.

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

Well," said Madame Morrible in a carrying tone, "one expects poetry, if it is Poetry, to offend. It is the Right of Art.