Gregory Maguire
No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.Collection: Losing
Of course. You get everything from books.Collection: Book
I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can.Collection: Hurt
I hate New Year's Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven't yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn't matter.Collection: New Year
Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.Collection: Growing Up
You confuse not speaking with not listening.Collection: Listening
[Puggles] "What population signs on willingly for slavery?" "You mean other than wives?" [Glinda]Collection: Mean
All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn't we hear a voice of prophecy.Collection: Voice
And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the side stepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever.Collection: Girl
Approval is overrated...Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without.Collection: Mind
Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.Collection: Understanding
Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?Collection: Struggle
She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.Collection: Differences
It was deliciously pagan.Collection: Pagan
It’s the place of the story, beginning here, in the meadow of late summer flowers, thriving before the Atlantic storms drive wet and winter upon them all.Collection: Summer
Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn't rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled,...it is Art.Collection: Art
Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.Collection: Evil
The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.Collection: World
at least i'm talkng to myself. instead of giving myself the cold shoulderCollection: Giving
I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.Collection: Leaving
That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness-and life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same.Collection: Sadness
Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.Collection: Guilt
Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.Collection: Long
So she listened hard. And she began to evolve, because stories work their magic that way. They build conviction and erode conviction in equal measure.Collection: Magic
...looking at him makes her feel like laughing all over - as if she could laugh not just with her mouth but with her eyes, her heart, her very limbs.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Math
She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go.Collection: Leaving
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.Collection: Life
I learned to fly on a broom," he said, rolling up his sleeves. "I can learn to milk a goat, I bet." Though flying on a broom proved to be the easier task, he found.Collection: Flying
The storm dropped a house on her head.Collection: House
I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.Collection: Mean
That's all I want- to do no harm.Collection: Want
The story of Mirror Mirror is in many ways a story about evolution. Its about the evolution of a child into an adult. Its about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. Its about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Fighting
In a sense, Out of Oz is an examination of how individuals keep going, keep reinventing themselves and their lives, even after life-altering complications have afflicted them.Collection: Examination
Before you save anyone else, you have to save yourself. otherwise, you'rejust a bundle of tics, a stringed puppet manipulated by the chance and the insensible wind.Collection: Wind
Forgive us our trespasses," says Margarethe, "and get out of our way.Collection: Forgiving
Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate," said Elphaba. "See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something?Collection: Males
How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.Collection: Self
...the reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.Collection: Thinking
When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis, those who are the most themselves are the victims.Collection: Air
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.Collection: Children
The truth isn't a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on.Collection: Facts
It's unbecoming," she agreed. "A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.Collection: Perfect
Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.Collection: Needs
How deeply bound by cords of family anger we all are[...]None of us breaks free.Collection: Break
The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.Collection: Accessories
Everyone dies. It's a question of where and how, that's all.Collection: Dies
If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, that might be the best way to die.Collection: Might