Quotes by Gregory Maguire

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 someones horizon sweeps someone elses. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.

Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. Its so much like home, and then it holds out on you.

Come what may and hell to pay.

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

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

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

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 had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isnt smug, though adults often take it for smugness. Its something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experience the long-held suspicion of our species, that the enchanted world of childhood is merely a mask for something else, a more subtle and paradoxical magic.- p. 157

Galinda didnt see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear yet...She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart. But there was more than one way to be smart.

What will I do if I find myself with a heart? Lose it constantly, I imagine.

He hadnt yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.

I have always felt like a pawn... My skin colors been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any lifes work of my own, I havent found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that.

Don’t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it’s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing.

But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.

I like the sound of words, but I dont ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.

A world emerging, daily, out of nothing, a world that we trust to resemble what weve seen previously. We should know better.

Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but Ive learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.

Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle

Oh, everything is gorgeous once its gone.

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