The collection / 117 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1954 AD

Donâ€™t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if itâ€™s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and thatâ€™s almost the same thing.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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02c. 1954 AD

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

Gregory Maguire / quote

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03c. 1954 AD

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

Gregory Maguire / quote

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04c. 1954 AD

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 present, or at least better organized in the mind.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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05c. 1954 AD

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.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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06c. 1954 AD

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.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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07c. 1954 AD

For who was in thrall to whom, really? And could it ever be known? Each agent working in collusion and antagonism - like the cold and the sun alike creating a deadly spear of ice... Who is in thrall to whom? And while you wait to learn, the deadly icicle, formed by all opposing forces, falls and drives its cold nail into penetrable flesh.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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08c. 1954 AD

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

Gregory Maguire / quote

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09c. 1954 AD

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.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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10c. 1954 AD

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

Gregory Maguire / quote

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11c. 1954 AD

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.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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12c. 1954 AD

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.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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13c. 1954 AD

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.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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14c. 1954 AD

Come what may and hell to pay.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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15c. 1954 AD

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

Gregory Maguire / quote

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16c. 1954 AD

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

Gregory Maguire / quote

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17c. 1954 AD

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

Gregory Maguire / quote

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18c. 1954 AD

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 / quote

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19c. 1954 AD

She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn't smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It's something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experience the long-held suspicion of our species, that the enchanted world of childhood is merely a mask for something else, a more subtle and paradoxical magic.- p. 157

Gregory Maguire / quote

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20c. 1954 AD

Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear yet...She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart. But there was more than one way to be smart.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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21c. 1954 AD

What will I do if I find myself with a heart?" "Lose it constantly, I imagine.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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22c. 1954 AD

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 / quote

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23c. 1954 AD

I have always felt like a pawn... My skin color's been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life's work of my own, I haven't found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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24c. 1954 AD

Don’t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it’s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing.

Gregory Maguire / quote

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