Gregory Maguire Quotes - Page 4

I don't like work like that. I am the silent partner. I work through events, I live on the sidelines, I dabble in causes and effects, I watch how the misbegotten creatures of this world live their lives.

The real thing about evil," said the Witch at the doorway, "isn't any of what you said. You figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It's like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.

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 you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

It's been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.

This is why you shouldn't fall in love, it blinds you. Love is wicked distraction.

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.

The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life and the older you get- the more specifically you harvest- the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).

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?

Forgive us our trespasses," says Margarethe, "and get out of our way.

Skibbereen have a hard time at [math]; the best that the smartest of them can do with adding two plus two is guessing: three plus one. Correct, sort of, but not always useful.

I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.

Elena had always felt like the center of her own world - who doesn't? The world arranged itself around her like petals around the stem of a flower. This way the meadows, that way the woodland. Over here, the baryn's estate, out there, the hills that hug the known world close and imply a world at beyond. She could never come up with the edge of a world, because it always kept going on beyond. She moved the center of the world as she walked. The world was balanced on her head.

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

...No opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.

Such silly things, children -- and so embarrassing -- because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last

Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.

No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.

The answer of course, is that the clock isn't meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.

She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she.

Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven. So you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.

They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.

Her sister's shoes. They sparkeled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkeled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood and thorny stars.

If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.