More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 3 - February 28, 2025
“I feel like a hostage to myself. Or to the baby.”
“Self-control?” She laughed, inching toward the edge of the bed. “I have no self left. I’m only a host for the parasite. Where’s my self, anyway? Where’d I leave that tired old thing?”
We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it—we’re slow learners, we women—we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production. But men don’t dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the death. Ah, we’re slow learners, Nanny countered. But they can’t learn at all.
“I don’t require all your attention, Frex, but I do need some of it!”
Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.
“Why can’t she break it?” asked Frex. “Because I do not to make it to be broken,” answered Turtle Heart. But he smiled at Frex, not aggressively. And Elphaba wandered around with the shiny glass as if it were a toy, catching shadows, reflections, lights on its imperfect surface, almost as if she were playing.
“And now respectable unionists are going in droves over to the pleasure faith,” said Frex, snorting, “or even tiktokism, which hardly even qualifies as a religion.
brings duties back out of the pain of the past. Turtle Heart to forget. But when words are to speak in the air, actions must to follow.”
“The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing,” she murmured, trying it out, “while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.”
“I don’t read very well. So I don’t think I think very well either.” Galinda smiled. “I dress to kill, though.”
He is a boy, just as boys are. A little dull, maybe, but he hasn’t had the advantages we’ve had.” “Which are?” prompted Glinda. “Even for a short time,” said Elphaba, “we had a mother. Giddy, alcoholic, imaginative, uncertain, desperate, brave, stubborn, supportive woman.
The mother, shall we say, died in a sadly timed explosion.
and to give whatever passes for affection in cats.
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.
propose an afterlife for evil,” said Elphaba. “Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. It’s shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward.”
“I pity the community of the afterlife when they’re asked to welcome you in. What a sour apple you always are.”
“I was a good child,” Elphie said stoutly. “I took care of my little sister, who was horribly disfigured from birth. I obeyed my father, and my mother until she died. I tramped around as a missionary child and gave testimonials to the Unnamed God even though I was essentially faithless. I believed in obedience, and I don’t believe it hurt me.” “Then what did hurt you?” asked Sarima wittily.
Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on—or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense.”
“And what do you do?” he said. “Are you married?” “I’m a witch,” she answered.
She hides behind her devotion the way a terrorist hides behind his ideals—”
People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.” He sighed. “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
She liked children no more than she ever had, but years of dealing with monkeys had given her an insight into the infant mentality she had never grasped before.
Elphaba the girl does not know how to see her father as a broken man. All she knows is that he passes his brokenness on to her.
“It isn’t hard to find evil in this world,” said the Witch. “Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.”
“She’s BLINDING THE GUESTS COMING FOR DINNER!” “Well, that’s one way to avoid having to dust, I suppose.”
The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.
