Quotes by Gregory Maguire

About Gregory Maguire:

Gregory Maguire is an American novelist. He is the author of the novels Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and many other novels for adults and children. Many of Maguire's adult novels are revisionist retellings of classic children's stories: for example, in Wicked he transformed the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its 1939 film adaption into the misunderstood protagonist Elphaba. Wicked was turned into one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all-time, of the same name. One of Maguire's short stories is featured in the 2004 compilation Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the pre...

Gregory Maguire

Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.

Gregory Maguire

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

Gregory Maguire

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

Gregory Maguire

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

Gregory Maguire

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

Gregory Maguire

When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.

Gregory Maguire

The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again. Everything was...

Gregory Maguire

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

Gregory Maguire

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

Gregory Maguire

The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

Gregory Maguire

I was quite a looker in my time," she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know she must be hideous? "Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?

Gregory Maguire

He was not so lucky. He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.

Gregory Maguire

He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.

Gregory Maguire

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

It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?

Gregory Maguire

I know it sounds foolishly old fashioned, but I'm stuck with this idea that there's something dignified and noble about facing your enemy and looking him in the eye before you thrust a saber in his heart.

Gregory Maguire

The sun is the biggest metaphor. The sun is the first candle. She can get there by its light.

Gregory Maguire

Women can go mad with insomnia. The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird -- a souveni...

Gregory Maguire

It took me a moment to realize but I was having an epiphany. I was standing in the middle of Times Square wearing nothing but purple tennis sneakers with the laces pulled out, clutching an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand and a shit-eating...

Gregory Maguire

I look around and some of the people are sitting in their chairs just staring across the room. Some are actually eating but some are eating the paper plate and their food is all over the table and the floor. I look down again and my sandwich is gone....

Gregory Maguire

Author Bio

  • NameGregory Maguire
  • DescriptionNovelist
  • BornJune 9, 1954
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist