Out of Oz (Wicked Years, #4)

by Gregory Maguire

“Mid pleasure and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” he read. “John Howard Payne.”

“My mind to me a kingdom is, Such present joys therein I find, That it excels all other bliss That Earth affords or grows by kind. Sir Edward Dyer.”

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.

Sweet and sure the lilacs bloom, And the heather, and the broom. Every mouse and mole rejoices When the sparrows raise their voices.

Some lives are like steps and stairs, every period an achievement built on a previous success.

Other lives hum with the arc of the swift spear. Only ever one thing, that dedicated life, from start to finish, but how magnificently concentrated its journey. The trajectory seems so true as to be proof of predestination.

Still other lives are more like the progress of a child scrabbling over boulders at a lakeside—now up, now down, always the destination blocked from view. Now a wrenched ankle, no...

I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing.”

I am alive. But I’m not that girl. I’m a woman grown from a life broken in the middle. I’m not even a cousin of that girl I was so long ago.

Little Ferny Shuttlefoot Made a mutton pasty. Sliced it quick and gulped it quick And perished rather hasty.

Reginald Mouch sat on a couch. A ladybug bit him and he said ouch. It smiled at him. He started to laugh And bit that ladybug back. In half.

One Munchkinlander went out for a stroll, Two girls from Gillikin danced with a troll. Three little Glikkun girls chewed on their pinkies. Four little Winkie boys showed us their winkies. Five Ugabumish girls started their blood. Six little Quadlings went home to eat mud. Now who wins the prize for being most pretty? The girl from the Emerald, Emerald City. One Ozma, two Ozma, three Ozma.

She doesn’t know that the world is made up of accidents jackknifed into every moment, waiting to spring out.

Alone as a goose in a gale

The invisible world—the world of her instincts—though solitary, was real.

Spidery spiders in the wood No one knows you very good. No one can and no one should.

“Headed to tomorrow. Equally impossible to tell what’s on the other side of that, but we’ll find out when we get there,” said the dwarf.

Wouldn’t that be nice, to be a fish. And have someplace to swim to.

“Tiss toss, somebody’s cross. What’s gotten under your skin?”

Remember—the morning is always brightest after the moonless night.”

What would she be when she grew up? She whispered the answer. “Gone.”

The night is dark, my hinny, my hen Romance in the air, my dove, my duck; The less I see of you, my dear, The more I bless my blessed luck. Come near for a kiss, come near for a cluck, I’ll climb aboard and blindly—