Quotes by Gregory Maguire

Do you expect to learn anything at Shiz?” he asked. “I have already learned not to speak to strangers.” “Then I will introduce myself and we will be strangers no longer. I am Dillamond.” “I am disinclined to know you.

Are you an aberration to your species? she cried. Cats dont look for approval!

You need my help? What for? Bread, cash, a fake identity to help you slip sideways through the cracks? Tell me what you need, tell me why I should help, and Ill see what I can do. In memory of Elphaba. You knew her. Her head titled again, but up, this time, and it was to keep the sudden wetness from spilling into her carefully colored false eyelashes. You knew my Elphie!

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions cant create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we dont in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.

Her head had turned quickly away...Not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence.

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.

Dont wish,said Rain, dont start. Wishing only...

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

Well, I learned to cook. At my age, she told him. Whats next? Art therapy? Anyway, Ive had quite a time of it this summer, and who knows what eases down on any road. Come, Rain. A quick goodbye, and off you go. Goodbye, said Rain to the Lion, and then to the woman. Not to them, said Glinda, To me.She turned eyes that were saucerly upon Glinda. Mum?

He was not so lucky. He hadnt yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.

He lingered at the door, and said, The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you wan

In the end, all disguises must drop.

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

The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.

When you cant die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.

You cant be said to have properly established yourself in a place until you have been seen there.

Nothing in the Grimmerie on how to depose a tyrant - nothing useful... Nothing there that described why men and women could turn out so horrible. Or so wonderful - if that ever happens anymore.

In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.

But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home youre missing, or the someone youre missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesnt see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

I think thats shameful, even if its just a story, to propose an afterlife for evil... Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. Its shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward.