Quotes from Gregory Maguire

Simpatico, it's Italian for 'sympathetic.' Hearts beating to the same pulse. That's what music does for one, you know—I mean, for two. For more. It trains hearts to lean in the same direction. Sympathetically.

Horrors, said Elphaba. It was her first word, and it was greeted with silence. Even the moon, the lambent bowl among the trees, seemed to pause. Horrors? Elphaba said again, looking around. Though her mouth was serious, her eyes glowed; she had realized her own accomplishment. She was nearly two years old. The big sharp teeth in her mouth could not keep her words locked inside anymore. Horrors, she tried in a whisper. Horrors.

People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

All green things brown.

I'm not looking for happiness. But I'm not looking for an ending either. pg. 544

But is life worth living in the wrong form?" said Elphie. "The interior doesn't change," she answered, "except by self-involvement. Of which be not afraid, and also beware.

I didn't think friendship required this much, snapped Elphaba to Boq, I was better off before.

I know Oz, now, she said, and in the carving of the lintel she found that common ideogram, a Z circled with an O. Usually letters don't hide inside each other, she told Glinda firmly. No, that's true. In Oz, I suppose, something is always hiding...

So Elena goes out. Can you see her? Over there, on the path by the fence made of wire and disoriented wooden rails. Now in the shadows of the juniper, now coming into the light. There.

one expects poetry, if it is Poetry, to offend.

Sing a hymn to rectitude, Ye forward-thinking multitude. Advance in humble gratitude For strictest rules of attitude. To elevate the Common Good In Brotherhood and Sisterhood We celebrate authority. Fraternity, Sorority, United, pressing onward, we Restrict the ills of liberty. There is no numinosity Like Power's generosity In helping curb atrocity. Bear down on the rod and foil the child.

Shame has a dreadful smell. So

Galinda, who didn't know much about Poetry, thought perhaps this was the accepted way of appreciating it. She grumbled a little to Shenshen, who sat in a straightback chair to one side, looking dropsical. Wax from the taper was about to drip onto Sheenshen's silk-shouldered white gown with the lemon-chiffon swags, and ruin it, most likely, but Galinda decided Shenshen's family could afford to replace a gown. She kept still.

Evil is moral at it heart. The selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience.

Let's see what we have in the larder. We have eye of newt and toe of frog, carbon-crisp residue of manticore loin, a beaker of all-natural belladonna extract, some wolfbane, some romaine, a poteen of ptomaine, and a few limp radishes in butter, pinched from the platter left out for Marat after his bath, which he never got to since he died therein. Let's have cheerios. I don't know what cheerios are, said Cat. They haven't been invented yet. You'll love them.

I am forty. [...] I know who I am. The treachery of possibilities that threaten to swamp a young guy -- I negotiated them. I'm on the other side. The safe side. Why then do I remember the perilous moments with such fond affection?

Without a memory, what does experience mean -- or matter?

Against the mutability of dream, the natural laws advocated by our bewigged Enlightenment forebears are powerless. Newton, for instance, insists on gravity and other prohibitions of the physical world, from which (while we are awake) we are never free. But we can fly in dreams.

What is there that makes my life worth preserving? "I love you," said Elphaba. "So that's that then, and that's it," he answered her, and himself. "And I love you. So I promise to be careful." Careful of us both, he thought. So he stalked her again. Love makes hunters of us all.

People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. It's people who claim that they're good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.

No one is exempt from grief." The

Regret could disguise itself in a thousand veils, you could perish before having the strength to drag the last one away.

As Solomon said in the Old Book, if two women squabble over which of them is the mother of a certain infant, the way to solve the problem is to cut the baby in half and share the baby in parts.

I am alive. But I'm not that girl. I'm a woman grown from a life broken in the middle.