Quotes from Gregory Maguire

Good gracious, dear, all of life is a spell. You know that.

Life is a challenge, Laura Maria Ciardi, You have to meet it.

You can't be said to have properly established yourself in a place until you have been seen there.

She wasn't Zeus, to cause Phaëthon to stop driving the chariot of bright Helios: she couldn't halt the daily chariot of crushing light and rushing time.

belongs. I can't afford so much as a footman to scour Saint Petersburg." "You must afford it. It is said, 'One

Besides, thought the girl, what miracle didn't look ridiculous while it was happening? If a miracle was ordinary, it would be like, just, so what?

the tilting of an eyebrow. This was too obscure a hieroglyphic for the Vicar to decipher, no matter how Miss Armstrong concentrated the pure fire of her being in the muscles of her forehead. One day she would self-immolate... Spontaneous combustion caused by an eyebrow left to smolder a moment too long.

The law says one thing, and custom another," replied Mr. Winter. "What the assemblies legislate and what happens on the back roads of small towns are not always in agreement. Put another way, history takes a long time to happen.

Is there - is there need in the Afterlife?

She hobbled away into the dark, saying her prayers aloud. Old saint Nicholas, young saint Mark Keep me safe in the pesky dark Saint Olga of the hight Himalayas Send me a set of cashmere pajamas.

What's impossible, she said, is to know the truth inside someone else's heart if they don't tell you. pg. 556

Literary pleasure, and a sense of recognition and identification, real though they are, burn off like alcohol in the flame of the next heated moment.

The chronic fun of writing, the distraction of it, was not knowing.

As the first hard drops of rain fell, the Witch caught sight, not of the girl's face, but of the shoes. Her sister's shoes. They sparkled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood, and thorny stars.

but not what it meant to her. Not how it felt. Because stories, maybe, were drafts of reality based on feelings.

And so the feast-day of the nativity of the Christ Child approached with its usual panic, uproar, and greed.

And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations.

a story can be adored for centuries. But it cannot be derailed. A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking. It is progressive and inevitable as the seasons.

As for dreams, they are powered by urgent desire, even if that desire is only to escape the quotidian

There's a reason we live in time. We are too small a flask [...] to tolerate too much knowing. Instead, truth must drip through us as through a pipette, to allow only moments of apprehension. Moments diffuse and miniature enough to be survived.

Always the godfather, never the god

Also there was the thrill, basis indeterminable, which made Glinda shy, and caused her to rush her words, and to speak in a false high voice like an adolescent. How quickly you could be thrown back to the terrible uncertainty of your youth! For

Everybody needs to grow up and leave home sometimes. But sometimes home doesn't like it

The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing.