Quotes from Gregory Maguire

To consider what other people might say is hardly a good reason to take action or to defer it. You have your own life to live, Iris, and at its end, the only opinion that amounts to anything is that which God bestows

It's the place of the story, beginning here, in the meadow of late summer flowers, thriving before the Atlantic storms drive wet and winter upon them all.

So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.

Those times are over and gone, and good riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the tick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.

Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!

You can endure any sort of prison if you can apprehend a window in the dark.

It's hard to find evil in this world,' said the Witch. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.

The storm dropped a house on her head.

The real thing about evil… you figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.

Think of egg and spoon. If there is an egg, well, fine. You eat. Unless you use your spoon to hold the egg out of my reach. Does being in possession of a spoon give you more right to the egg?

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

Are you the dart? he said. Are you the knife? The fuse? She said (though he wasn't convinced): My deane, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad...

Puggles] What population signs on willingly for slavery? You mean other than wives? [Glinda]

This is what fun is like, said Rain, almost to herself.

A capacity for interiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation to squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hollowness. The syndrome especially plagues anyone who lives behind a mask...A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I know what I know?

What is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it.

It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?

She watched the sun bleed water out of the icicle. Warm and cold working together to make an icicle. Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.

Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing -- by dint of ignorance and innocence -- that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way.

Some said the original evil was the vacuum caused by the Fairy Queen Lurline leaving us alone here. When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil and maybe slpits apart and multiplies. So every evil thing is a sign of the absence of deity

The world was floods above and fire below

Ah, the inner eye blinks, and the spirit trembles, at the dangerous cost of seeing one's self as one is.

No, she cried, no, no, I'm not a harem, I'm not a woman, I'm not a person, no.

How easily Neverland is corrupted into the deserted island of Lord of the Flies . How quickly Tinkerbell regresses to being one of the flies pestering the gouged eye sockets of the pig that the lost boys butcher.