Quote

So she listened hard. And she began to evolve, because stories work their magic that way. They build conviction and erode conviction in equal measure.

Gregory Maguire

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Gregory Maguire
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 9
Novelist
Writer
Albany
New York
Equal
Erode
Stories
Listened
Hard
Evolve
Work
Measure
Way
Conviction
Began
Build
Magic

More quotes by Gregory Maguire

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And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.' Did she ever come out?' Not yet.
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And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.
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[Puggles] What population signs on willingly for slavery? You mean other than wives? [Glinda]
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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.
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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.
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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
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She assumes that skill will guide her fingertips, that shapely lines will uncoil out of the pencil the moment she starts. Surely talent is a thing curled deep inside, just waiting to be exercised, and at the slightest invitation it will stretch, shake itself, make itself known? Talent, it seems, is not so insistent.
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I learned failure early and mastered it.
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Sorrow has a name, and its name is loneliness. Sorrow has a shape, and its shape is absence. Sorrow is a sickness like any other.
Gregory Maguire
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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
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No one controls your destiny. Even at the very worst - there is always choice.
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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.
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I learned to fly on a broom, he said, rolling up his sleeves. I can learn to milk a goat, I bet. Though flying on a broom proved to be the easier task, he found.
Gregory Maguire
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Yes, I'm nervous. You'll find in time most people are. They simply learn better how to disguise it, and sometimes, if they're wise, how to use their anxiety to serve the public good.
Gregory Maguire
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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
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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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The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.
Gregory Maguire
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Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.
Gregory Maguire
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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.
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I was just about to begin writing Mirror Mirror, within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.
Gregory Maguire