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She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands-as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her own way.

Gregory Maguire

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Gregory Maguire
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 9
Novelist
Writer
Albany
New York
Hands
Sunlight
Way
Boards
Skirmish
Like
Held
Nightgown
Terror
Upcoming
Understood
Glare
Lasts
Shyness
Last
Liquid
Beautiful
Dropped

More quotes by Gregory Maguire

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The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.
Gregory Maguire
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If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, that might be the best way to die.
Gregory Maguire
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Little critters fried like fritters come out crunchy and divine.
Gregory Maguire
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Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing. If one could drown in the grass...it might be the best way to die.
Gregory Maguire
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Some said the original evil was the vacuum caused by the Fairy Queen Lurline leaving us alone here. When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil and maybe slpits apart and multiplies. So every evil thing is a sign of the absence of deity
Gregory Maguire
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... the decades looked on and didn't notice her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn't see revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.
Gregory Maguire
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There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.
Gregory Maguire
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The colossal might of wickedness: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.
Gregory Maguire
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His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.
Gregory Maguire
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We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it--we're slow learners, we women--we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production.
Gregory Maguire
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That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?
Gregory Maguire
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If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.
Gregory Maguire
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Evil 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
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Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.
Gregory Maguire
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Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate, said Elphaba. See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something?
Gregory Maguire
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Skibbereen have a hard time at [math] the best that the smartest of them can do with adding two plus two is guessing: three plus one. Correct, sort of, but not always useful.
Gregory Maguire
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How poetic you are, she said. I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.
Gregory Maguire
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She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.
Gregory Maguire
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I don't like work like that. I am the silent partner. I work through events, I live on the sidelines, I dabble in causes and effects, I watch how the misbegotten creatures of this world live their lives.
Gregory Maguire
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And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the side stepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever.
Gregory Maguire