Gregory Maguire
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.Collection: Baby
The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.Collection: Entertainment
The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective.Collection: Mirrors
...perhaps charity is the kind of beauty that we comprehend the best because we miss it the most.Collection: Missing
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.Collection: Children
Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!Collection: Cat
I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.Collection: May
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Real
This is why you shouldn't fall in love, it blinds you. Love is wicked distraction.Collection: Falling In Love
The world was floods above and fire belowCollection: Fire
To consider what other people might say is hardly a good reason to take action or to defer it. You have your own life to live, Iris, and at its end, the only opinion that amounts to anything is that which God bestowsCollection: People
That's what misbehavior is all about, just a little extra loving being asked for.Collection: Teaching
...and he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, little by little by little.Collection: Love
I was just about to begin writing Mirror Mirror, within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.Collection: Writing
But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him "Yero, my hero," and that melted his heart.Collection: Hero
It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however, that shortly thereafter, the Wizard absconded from the Palace. He left in the way he had first arrived-- a hot-air balloon-- just a few hours before seditious ministers were to lead a Palace revolt and to hold an execution without trial.Collection: Heart
The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar.Collection: Moon
Even God used silence as a strategy.Collection: Silence
Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. Beautiful in the concept, if we're lucky, but frequently tedious or regrettable as we flesh ourselves out.Collection: Beautiful
Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow.Collection: Flow
They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.Collection: Green Fields
The colossal might of wickedness: 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.Collection: Doe
If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.Collection: Eye
So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.Collection: Eye
When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.Collection: Light
... the decades looked on and didn't notice her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn't see revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.Collection: Destiny
He knew about being alone. The weather was always cold there.Collection: Weather
The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.Collection: Memories
So he stalked her again. Love makes hunters of us all.Collection: Hunters
She's sent the crows out to blind the guests coming for dinner!" What?" She's BLINDING THE GUESTS COMING FOR DINNER!" Well, that's one way to avoid having to dust, I suppose.Collection: Dust
However in the world did her skin come green?" Nanny wondered, stupidly, for Melena blanched and Frex reddened, and the baby held her breath as if trying to turn blue to please them all. Nanny had to slap her to make her breath again.Collection: Baby
A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him -so why bother?- but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible.Collection: Mind
Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing. If one could drown in the grass...it might be the best way to die.Collection: Glowing
And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no "after", in the "ever after" of a Witch there is no "happily"; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is-alas, or perhaps thank mercy-no telling. She was dead, dead, and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.Collection: Wicked
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.Collection: Air
She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands-as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her own way.Collection: Beautiful
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.~CandleCollection: Memories
Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?Collection: Drama
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.Collection: Soul
In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.Collection: Summer
There were more ways to live than the ones given by one's superiorsCollection: Way To Live
Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.Collection: Color
One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her~is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?Collection: Struggle
Happy endings are still endings.Collection: Happy Endings
A capacity for inferiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation by squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hallowness. The syndrom especially plaques anyone who lives behind a mask. An elephant in her disquise as a human princess, a scarecrow with painted features, a glittering tiara under which to glow and glide in anonymous glamour. A witch's hat, a wizards stole, a scholars gown, a soldiers dress sartorials. A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I nkow what I know.Collection: Princess
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.Collection: Loneliness
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.Collection: Children
A man is called a traitor, or liberator. A rich man is a thief or philanthropist. Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It's all in which label is able to persist.Collection: Men