Gregory Maguire Quotes - Page 2

Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on - or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense

It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.

Oh, mercy, there is nothing monstrously ugly about you. Ruth may be unpleasing, but you are merely plain. If anything, it's my beauty that's monstrous, for it sweeps away any other aspect of my character.

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.

The beauty of the day is the only thing that doesn't fade in time. Day after day, such beauty revives itself.

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

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.

But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before.

Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It's so much like home, and then it holds out on you.

Come what may and hell to pay.

We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history

Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

The real thing about evil… you figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.

To grow a melody?"
"You can't grow a melody on purpose,” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental.

There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.

Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met