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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3463c60 | If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, it might be the best way to die. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 26a405d | After all, what kind of a life is it that is not pestered by insects? A perfect one, and since life is not perfect, this cannot be life. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 9f3fa64 | Your life and times don't drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret). | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 4365401 | Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them. We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls.... | Gregory Maguire | ||
| a7091df | When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis," she said, "those who are the most themselves are the victims." | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 5993f14 | Though who knows the architecture of the mind, and whether the arches that open upon discrete episodes are ordered in any way sequentialy? | Gregory Maguire | ||
| bb06a18 | The alluring stars in an apparently endless sky had, after all, been a disguise for the cloud of spirits. Ghosts perhaps could lie in death as well as creatures could lie in life. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 0a22d81 | Everything was not merely relative, it was-how to put it?-relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| e258850 | Your name is Rain, isn't it? Rain slips in the cracks and slides through the seams. You can do it? Can't you? | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 2a5620d | Why were memories so independent? So jealous of corroborating detail? | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 49d6433 | Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| bbb4398 | The premise is prejudicial and proves that what's wanted here isn't a trial but a conviction. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 2622b1a | As the first hard drops of rain fell, the Witch caught sight, not of the girl's face, but of the shoes. Her sister's shoes. They sparkled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood, and thorny stars. | beauty shoes | Gregory Maguire | |
| c6b19aa | The madder the battle, the saner the peace. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 74ba861 | Look," she said, opening it up, fanning its blank pages in his direction. "This is a book, too, and precious little is written in it. It's just as accurate as the Grimmerie, and maybe more so. Don't be chagrined by its blankness. Be liberated instead. Go on, it's yours. I have never written a word in it worth saving, so what I give you isn't magic or the benefit of my thinking, but my belief in the blankness of our futures. Charms only go s.. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| b83c94c | So--if the oldest memories could contaminate one another, could prove impossible--what good was memory at al? | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 69a08c8 | The louder the cannon, the deafer the peacemakers. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| a3a947e | You two are just up the stairs. Next to my room, so I can keep an eye on you should you get up to anything." "What's your name so I can call it out during wild sex?" -- | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 8feec20 | A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| b51e9ea | Hush, child don't ask personal questions," said the Lion. "That's the only kind I have," said Rain." | realness | Gregory Maguire | |
| 6db7bd8 | Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page - but then the world is the same way, isn't it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtapo.. | secrets the-world | Gregory Maguire | |
| 31e04c6 | 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. | reading words | Gregory Maguire | |
| 457eb8e | I care as much as I can, but I don't spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| dcce23a | 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 spam. Your life and times don't drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. T.. | meaning mystery | Gregory Maguire | |
| d1c397f | It's been a long, rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness. | life possibility | Gregory Maguire | |
| 3da4b7c | Then, abrupt and decisive, the Emerald City rose before them. A city of insistence, of blanket declaration. It made no sense, clotting up the horizon, sprouting like a mirage on the characterless plains of central Oz. Glinda hated it from the moment she saw it. Brash upstart of a city. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| bb276ff | 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. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| f2de49c | Woe is the natural end of life, yet we go on having babies. | death life | Gregory Maguire | |
| 443fe19 | And that aroma of sex ... soft baby asparagus cut with a weak solution of Clorox. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 2ff07ef | But is life worth living in the wrong form?" said Elphie. "The interior doesn't change," she answered, "except by self-involvement. Of which be not afraid, and also beware." | Gregory Maguire | ||
| a467740 | I am alive. But I'm not that girl. I'm a woman grown from a life broken in the middle. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 9036cb9 | She seems to float in a life next to ours, with limited contact. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 2eaabb5 | And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations. | journey life locomotion | Gregory Maguire | |
| 83e295b | The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| affbfb6 | The tedious never die; that's what makes them tedious. | tedious | Gregory Maguire | |
| 0a67d90 | Now this is this, or seems to be. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 857e864 | Humans are so blind, their eyes on the ground, themselves always at the center. 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 someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| e5a03eb | Sometimes I think that vengeance is habit forming too. A stiffness of the attitude. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| c99a04b | The thing is I have become fond of Galinda myself. Behind her starry-eyed love of herself there is a mind struggling to work. She does think about things. When her mind is really working, she could, if led, think on you - even, I suspect, somewhat fondly. I suspect. I don't know. But when she slides back into herself, I mean into the girl who spends two hours a day curling that beautiful hair, it's as if the thinking Galinda goes into some .. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| bb572b9 | He was hungry without yet knowing that hunger could be slaked by food; he was lonely without yet knowing that loneliness could be slaked, too. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 83f29e8 | 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. | philosophy | Gregory Maguire | |
| 9d11086 | For who was in thrall to whom, really? And could it ever be known? Each agent working in collusion and antagonism - like the cold and the sun alike creating a deadly spear of ice... Who is in thrall to whom? And while you wait to learn, the deadly icicle, formed by all opposing forces, falls and drives its cold nail into penetrable flesh. | power | Gregory Maguire | |
| 6f04210 | I have always felt like a pawn... My skin color's 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 life's work of my own, I haven't found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that. | destiny fate free-will | Gregory Maguire | |
| 80bc406 | Well," said Madame Morrible in a carrying tone, "one expects poetry, if it is Poetry, to offend. It is the Right of Art." | Gregory Maguire |