Gregory Maguire Quotes

No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.

The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.

It's the work that's important, not the individual who does it.

But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.

I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.

Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.

Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they've imagined us.

The world was floods above and fire below

Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing - by dint of ignorance and innocence - that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way.

One never knows 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? It is the very least question of definitions.

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.

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

What's big, thick, makes the earth move, and wants to have its way with you?" "I don't know, but can you introduce me?

Of course. You get everything from books.

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

(from the short story The Honorary Shepherds)...you can't be kicked out of a faith. Faith starts inside your heart and ends up in eternity. All you can be kicked out of is a building, which is the bus stop of faith, sort of, and what's a building?

And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-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.

History plays for keeps; individuals play for time.