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2de312a
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Everyone has a right to love the land that gave them the things they need to live. It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think... that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to allow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful too.
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home
patriotism
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Gregory Maguire |
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3f7dbca
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He had forgotten how convincing the world could look, how sure of itself: its outlines and edges; it's gradations, recessions, protrusions; it's startling and vulgar colors.
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Gregory Maguire |
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6b2a40e
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What more does one ask of life, really, but to stagger from moment to moment with a reason to wake and wait for the next reason to wake?
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Gregory Maguire |
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00b3a4f
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Perplexity isn't as noble as conviction, but perhaps more good is done in the name of muddling through uncertainty than is done hacking away with the righteous sword of self-confidence.
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Gregory Maguire |
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e12069c
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You mean you indulged in adultery and you dont' even have the benefit of a good saucy memory about it.
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Gregory Maguire |
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c6c55db
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The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again. Everything was not merely relative, it was--how to put it? --relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.
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perspective
perception
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Gregory Maguire |
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e24b32a
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It's heaven to know that it's still possible to run, though she doesn't know what she's running from.
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Gregory Maguire |
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922156d
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As an old friend of mine once said when I brought him some interesting brownies, 'You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes,'" she replied. "Haven't you read your Maimonides?"
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Gregory Maguire |
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c833cb7
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Damn the human stomach, this fat betrayor of ideals
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Gregory Maguire |
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85f8099
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All these last months he had begun to talk about Sarima and the family as if they were ghosts, hiding just around the curve of the spiral staircase in the tower, suppressing giggles at this long, long game of hide-and-seek.
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Gregory Maguire |
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2afc1d4
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One day he would finish the job of dying he'd begun in childhood/
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Gregory Maguire |
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4a73cb6
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Your life story is really about how the hands of history caught you up, played with you, and you with them. History plays for keeps; individuals play for time. When
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Gregory Maguire |
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a95f3e6
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Marmalade has to make its own way in life, like the rest of us, she thought.
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Gregory Maguire |
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0302406
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The toys can help in the battle." "Mother Ginger? I doubt it!" "Never underestimate the value of a mother in wartime. She has the most to fight for."
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wartime
toys
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Gregory Maguire |
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4a70be0
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I was quite a looker in my time," she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know she must be hideous? "Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?"
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old-age
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Gregory Maguire |
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69b1623
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What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.
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Gregory Maguire |
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16994d4
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I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope. They say I did, at least, and so does he.
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Gregory Maguire |
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55dec47
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and Ama Clutch was gone, and the overly subordinate pillowcase took a small spill of human juice from the edge of her slackened mouth.
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Gregory Maguire |
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dc1ec9e
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this girl who seemed, increasingly, to be interested in learning to read everything except how human beings talked to one another.
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Gregory Maguire |
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12b4d09
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My job is to protect you, Lady Glinda even if you are loosing your mind.
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protection
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Gregory Maguire |
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7563791
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One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her-is it ever the right choice?
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Gregory Maguire |
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7496eaa
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Only he with the hobbled foot fully knows the beauty of running. Only he with the severed ear can apprehend what the sweetest music must sound like. Our ailments complete us.
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Gregory Maguire |
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df1bb41
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You know our Alice. She plays hide-and-seek but sometimes forgets to ask someone to look for her.
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Gregory Maguire |
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ffc4511
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I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness, she said.
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Gregory Maguire |
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039ad0e
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The unvisited grannies, in stone houses by the wheat field, can't remember their husbands or children. They worry their hands, though, hands that could do with a rinsing. The grannies think: We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is cor..
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Gregory Maguire |
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4f4bb4e
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The boy does well enough," said Vicente. "A goose does not ask much of life, after all." "No," she admitted. "Those who ask much are more likely disappointed. We should all be as simple as the goose."
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Gregory Maguire |
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5165d31
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We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.
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Gregory Maguire |
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1e60a25
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Aren't these the finest treasures? Each one springs up, and becomes more red than rubies, more fine than diamonds adn more valuable, so we are told; and before you can run back here again to look, the petals have begin to drop and the leaves to yellow. Look, they sag, they fall. Are they the more wonderful because they live such a short time.
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Gregory Maguire |
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4aa2453
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But I must pay attention now, she thinks, because what other choice is there? Maybe when I die my soul will fly to meet God, but when that time comes I won't have the use of clever hands, nor the burden of an ugly face; hands and face will be planted like bulbs in the soil, while only the bloom of the spirit emerges elsewhere. So let my hands and my face make their way in the world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.
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Gregory Maguire |
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c92fd76
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How truly novel. The emotional life of furniture. I never.
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Gregory Maguire |
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e621cc9
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To look into the mirror is to see the future, in blood and rubies.
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munchkinland
turtle-heart
wicked
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Gregory Maguire |
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f90cc8e
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The surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass.
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Gregory Maguire |
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3aa3d00
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She found her regard for Mr. Winter turning to something like suspicion--though notice how often we lower suspicion upon others to avoid putting ourselves under scrutiny. Now
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Gregory Maguire |
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34fa793
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But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don't lie about men, only women.
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Gregory Maguire |
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5c2154c
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What's missing from the literature of our species are the stories of the peasants. The filthy illiterate. Those with no firm address, no surname. No one to impress, nothing to lose. But the poor tell stories, too.
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literature
stories-of-people
poor-people
nutcracker
stories
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Gregory Maguire |
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b5d57ba
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Furniture!" bellowed the witch. "Tables, bathtub, the lot of you. It's time to go out in the world and seek your fortunes, if that's your hope." There was a crashing sound as all the furniture went and tried to hide under the bed, and the bed tried to hide under itself."
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Gregory Maguire |
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939430b
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I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral," said the Wizard. "In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical."
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morality
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Gregory Maguire |
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7e7bedf
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When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil, and maybe splits apart and multiplies.
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Gregory Maguire |
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e2aaf96
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Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are.
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Gregory Maguire |
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eb4a0b7
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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. ..
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Gregory Maguire |
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2d939e7
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For one short wet month early in the next year the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water frothing at the hedges bubbling at the roadside splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower
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Gregory Maguire |
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c17a45e
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How children love the broken thing! And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.
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Gregory Maguire |
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38bdb21
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The colossal might of wickedness, he thought: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.
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wickedness
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Gregory Maguire |
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fd0c7e0
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What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. 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 specificity you harvest--the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm.
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Gregory Maguire |