Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years, #1)

by Gregory Maguire

“Isn’t that funny, that deity is passé but the attributes and implications of deity linger—”

“At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change,”

“Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn’t rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled”—at this she jabbed herself with a hair pin and yelped—“it is Art. One might in fact call it the Superior, or the Finest, Art. It bypasses the Fine Arts of painting and drama and recitation. It doesn’t pose or represent the world. It becomes. A very noble calling.” She began to weep softly with the force of her own rhetoric. “Can there be a higher desire than to change the world? Not to draw Utopian blueprints, but really to order change? To revise the misshapen, reshape the mistaken, to justify the margins of this ragged error of a universe? Through sorcery to survive?”

“I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness,” she said. “And of women?” “Women are weaker, but their weakness is full of cunning and an equally rigid moral certainty. Since their arena is smaller, their capacity for real damage is less alarming. Though being more intimate they are the more treacherous.”

Was it an accident I saw that, Fiyero wondered, looking at the manager with new eyes. Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?

“To the grim poor there need be no pour quoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her—is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions.”

“When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are the most themselves are the victims.”

“The interior doesn’t change,” she answered, “except by self-involvement. Of which be not afraid, and also beware.”

“Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.”

“Cold anger?” “Oh yes, don’t you know that distinction? Tribal mothers always tell their children that there are two kinds of anger: hot and cold. Boys and girls experience both, but as they grow up the angers separate according to the sex. Boys need hot anger to survive. They need the inclination to fight, the drive to sink the knife into the flesh, the energy and initiative of fury. It’s a requirement of hunting, of defense, of pride. Maybe of sex, too.” “Yes, I know,” said Elphaba, remembering. Sarima blushed and looked unhappy, and continued. “And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the sidestepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever. It’s the compensation for a more limited scope in the world. 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.”

She hides behind her devotion the way a terrorist hides behind his ideals—”

“The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments,”

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.”

had a choice—an echo of what the Elephant Princess Nastoya had once said to her: No one controls your destiny. Even at the very worst—there is always choice.

“The real thing about evil,” said the Witch at the doorway, “isn’t any of what you said. You figure out one side of it—the human side, say—and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It’s like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.

It doesn’t occur in his conception of moral life that some sins are unforgivable.

If you could take the skewers of religion, those that riddle your frame, make you aware every time you move—if you could withdraw the scimitars of religion from your mental and moral systems—could you even stand? Or do you need religion as, say, the hippos in the Grasslands need the poisonous little parasites within them, to help them digest fiber and pulp? The history of peoples who have shucked off religion isn’t an especially persuasive argument for living without it. Is religion itself—that tired and ironic phrase—the necessary evil?

“It isn’t hard to find evil in this world,” said the Witch. “Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.”