Quote

I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.

Gregory Maguire

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Gregory Maguire
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 9
Novelist
Writer
Albany
New York
Book
Itch
Writing
Mosquitoes
Something
Relieve
Never
Bother
Like
Unless
Help
Write
Helping
Mosquito

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I shall pray for your soul,' promised Nessarose. I shall wait for your shoes,' Elphie answered.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.
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How poetic you are, she said. I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.
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No wonder Wonderland isn't funny to read anymore: We live there full time. We need a break from 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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To consider what other people might say is hardly a good reason to take action or to defer it. You have your own life to live, Iris, and at its end, the only opinion that amounts to anything is that which God bestows
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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.
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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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Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle
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If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.
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That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness-and life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same.
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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.
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Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.
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We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out.
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