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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.

Gregory Maguire

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Gregory Maguire
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 9
Novelist
Writer
Albany
New York
Thought
Contradictions
Best
Mortal
Soul
Contradiction
Live
Ignore
Mortals
Plot
Tales
Souls
Lapses

More quotes by Gregory Maguire

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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.
Gregory Maguire
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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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It's the only condition I know. Bitter Love, Loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.
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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.
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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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Just follow that one road the whole time!... I hope they don't get lost, I'm so bad at giving directions.
Gregory Maguire
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Approval is overrated...Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without.
Gregory Maguire
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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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Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life.
Gregory Maguire
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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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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
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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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We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out.
Gregory Maguire
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But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.
Gregory Maguire
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It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?
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 dabble in causes and effects.
Gregory Maguire
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Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.
Gregory Maguire
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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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Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.
Gregory Maguire