Gregory Maguire Quotes - Page 8

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

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.

Don't wish,"said Rain, "don't start. Wishing only...

What had survived - maybe all that had survived of Trism - was Liir's sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression - unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir's heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism's glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing.

I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.

It's unbecoming," she agreed. "A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.

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

Sorrow has a name, and its name is loneliness. Sorrow has a shape, and its shape is absence. Sorrow is a sickness like any other.

...perhaps charity is the kind of beauty that we comprehend the best because we miss it the most.

The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.

We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it--we're slow learners, we women--we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production.

If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, that might be the best way to die.

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.

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

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

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

So he stalked her again. Love makes hunters of us all.

In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realize it is far more common for men to turn into rats.

It's the only condition I know. Bitter Love, Loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.

Happy endings are still endings.

Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.

There were more ways to live than the ones given by one's superiors

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

The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar.