Quotes from Gregory Maguire

One never knows how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her — is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is the very least question of definitions.

She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.

The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

It's over the garden wall and we're going to see the Wizard, come what may and hell to pay. -Elphaba

quoting reminds me there are other people in the world besides only me. And other thoughts besides mine, and other ways of thinking.

Weren't you just doing the same thing, trying to maximize what had in order to get what you wanted? 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.

It was deliciously pagan.

The colossal might of wickedness: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.

Just follow that one road the whole time!... I hope they don't get lost, I'm so bad at giving directions..

I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I'd rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

Or is it just that the world upwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you're ready to see it anew?

Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish to hell he'd go away.

The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man.

She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go.

So she listened hard. And she began to evolve, because stories work their magic that way. They build conviction and erode conviction in equal measure.

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.

What is the use of beauty? i have lived my life surrounded by painters, and still I do not know the answer. But i suspect, some days, that beauty helps protect the spirit of mankind, swaddle it and succor it, so that we might survive. Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes or lives less miserable so that we might be more kind-well, then, lets have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories.

And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.

Why lock yourself in your own cage when someone is handing you a key?

Everyone dies. It's a question of where and how, that's all.

Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.

Immortality is a chancy thing; it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is.

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.