Quote

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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Gregory Maguire
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 9
Novelist
Writer
Albany
New York
Every
Rarely
Whispers
World
Systems
Meanings
Symbols
Imagery
Determined
Languages
Modalities
Private
Symbol
Shrieks
Elements
Obscure
Quixotic
Meaning
Multiple
Arcane
Language
Element
Juxtaposition

More quotes by Gregory Maguire

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In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.
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Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.
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[Puggles] What population signs on willingly for slavery? You mean other than wives? [Glinda]
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If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.
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Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?
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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.
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I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can.
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Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.
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All our lives are activity without meaning we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn't we hear a voice of prophecy.
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Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.
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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.
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When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.
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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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I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.
Gregory Maguire
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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.
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No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.
Gregory Maguire
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Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.
Gregory Maguire
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I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.
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You're fun to look at, decided Galinda. Boq's face fell. Fun? he said. I'd give a lot to achieve fun, Elphaba said. The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they're usually referring to digestion-
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In the end, all disguises must drop.
Gregory Maguire