01c. 1954 ADBut so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
02c. 1954 ADI 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.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
03c. 1954 ADA world emerging, daily, out of nothing, a world that we trust to resemble what we've seen previously. We should know better.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
04c. 1954 ADHello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
05c. 1954 ADMemory 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.~CandleGregory Maguire / quote ↗
07c. 1954 ADWhat is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
08c. 1954 ADIf magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
09c. 1954 ADAt its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
10c. 1954 ADThe 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.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
11c. 1954 ADThere were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
13c. 1954 ADWe 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 / quote ↗
14c. 1954 ADSecrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page – but then the world is the same way, isn’t it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
15c. 1954 ADWhat a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get – the more specificity you harvest – the more precious becomes every ounce and spam. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
16c. 1954 ADPeople who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
17c. 1954 ADAnd 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.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
18c. 1954 ADThe 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.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
19c. 1954 ADEvil 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.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
20c. 1954 ADIt isn't hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
21c. 1954 ADOne 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?Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
22c. 1954 ADOne 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? It is at the very least a question of definitions.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
23c. 1954 ADA notion of character, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives. They woke up, were they lucky enough to have consciousness, in the act of doing something they already knew how to do: feeding themselves with currants. Walking the dog. Knotting up a broken bootlace. Singing antiphonally in the choir. Suddenly: This is I, I am the girl singing this alto line off-key, I am the boy loping after the dog, and I can see myself doing it as, presumably, the dog cannot see itself. How peculiar! I lift on my toes at the end of the dock, to dive into the lake because I am hot, and while isolated like a specimen in the glassy slide of summer, the notions of hot and lake and I converge into a consciousness of consciousness–in an instant, in between launch and landing, even before I cannonball into the lake, shattering both my reflection and my old notion of myself.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
24c. 1954 ADGlinda waved dismissively. Then she tucked her hand against her mouth and bit her knuckles. It was hard to tell if her pretty ways were studied or innate. "Oh, oh," she managed, "I don't know that I'll see you again- and you remind me so of her.Gregory Maguire / quote ↗
