Quotes from Gregory Maguire

If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.

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.

The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.

They'd never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they'd been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.

You're fun to look at, decided Galinda. Boq's face fell. Fun? he said. I'd give a lot to achieve fun, Elphaba said. The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they're usually referring to digestion-

Okay let's get this over with, no I'm not seasick, yes I've always been green, No I didn't eat grass as a child.

She's sent the crows out to blind the guests coming for dinner! What? She's BLINDING THE GUESTS COMING FOR DINNER! Well, that's one way to avoid having to dust, I suppose.

Even God used silence as a strategy.

We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out.

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she...

How poetic you are, she said. I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.

Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?

Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing. If one could drown in the grass...it might be the best way to die.

I learned failure early and mastered it.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.

But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

It isn't whether you do it well or ill, it's that you do it all.

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.

This is why you shouldn't fall in love, it blinds you. Love is wicked distraction.

The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar.

A man is called a traitor, or liberator. A rich man is a theif or philanthropist. Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It's all in which label is able to persist.

The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.

Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.