Quote

Wishing is the beginning of imagination. They practice wishing when they are young things, and then -when they have grown - they have a developed imagination. Which can do some harm - greed, that kind of thing - but more often does them some good. They can imagine that things might be different. Might be other than they seem. Could be better.

Gregory Maguire

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Gregory Maguire
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 9
Novelist
Writer
Albany
New York
Good
Seems
Harm
Things
Doe
Beginning
Young
Seem
Better
Imagination
Might
Imagine
Wishing
Different
Practice
Developed
Thing
Wish
Greed
Kind
Often
Grown

More quotes by Gregory Maguire

Image
The answer of course, is that the clock isn't meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.
Gregory Maguire
Image
They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.
Gregory Maguire
Image
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
Image
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
Image
And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.' Did she ever come out?' Not yet.
Gregory Maguire
Image
No wonder Wonderland isn't funny to read anymore: We live there full time. We need a break from it.
Gregory Maguire
Image
Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.
Gregory Maguire
Image
I hate to be obvious, added the Scarecrow, but you'd have saved yourself a heap of trouble if you weren't too cheap to invest in a leash, Dorothy.
Gregory Maguire
Image
Such silly things, children -- and so embarrassing -- because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.
Gregory Maguire
Image
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
Image
So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.
Gregory Maguire
Image
If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.
Gregory Maguire
Image
Are you the dart? he said. Are you the knife? The fuse? She said (though he wasn't convinced): My deane, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad.
Gregory Maguire
Image
The 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
Image
If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, that might be the best way to die.
Gregory Maguire
Image
He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.
Gregory Maguire
Image
It’s the place of the story, beginning here, in the meadow of late summer flowers, thriving before the Atlantic storms drive wet and winter upon them all.
Gregory Maguire
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I learned failure early and mastered it.
Gregory Maguire