Mirror Mirror Quotes

“The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“Even God used silence as a strategy.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“I believe in the floor. I put it in place and I walk on it. Faith is a floor. If you don't work at making it for yourself, you have nothing to walk on.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“Happiness now sometimes meant turning away from what one remembered of earlier, better happiness.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“Speaking uses us up, speeds us up. Without prayer, that act of confession for merely existing, one might live forever and not know it.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don't lie about men, only women.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“What more does one ask of life, really, but to stagger from moment to moment with a reason to wake and wait for the next reason to wake?”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“He had forgotten how convincing the world could look, how sure of itself: its outlines and edges; it's gradations, recessions, protrusions; it's startling and vulgar colors.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“The years peeled slowly off, one by one, or perhaps dozens at a time.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eyes, and she who centers herself in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, distinction.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“I’m a priest, I know better than most when a lie is permitted.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“Please, I know nothing of the world, except my father is lost in it.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“Lucrezia Borgia couldn't be moved by the sentiment, nor could she forgive the insult. Old woman. Old.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impasti of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can’t create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope.
They say I did, at least, and so does he.
And who am I to make the Pope a liar,
And who is he to make a liar of me?”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“She wasn't Zeus, to cause Phaëthon to stop driving the chariot of bright Helios: she couldn't halt the daily chariot of crushing light and rushing time.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupants that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“What did it say about the movement of time, about what was about to happen, that I could understand the hummingbird spin of human voices?”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“The human mind-we have come to observe-tricks out distinctions in principles of oposition. A man more foul will likely be less benign. A woman with a greedy belly may also be mean with her widow's might. The way a man slakes his thirst and a woman slakes her thirst are not identical, for they thirst for different things.
Perhaps this is why humans rely on the mirror, to get beyond the simple me-you, handsome-hideous, menacing-merciful. In a mirror, humans see that the one is also also them: the two are the same, one one. The menace accompanies the mercy. The transcendent cohabits with the corrupt. What stirring lives humans have managed to live, knowing this of themselves! And so we have made a mirror, and in our foolishness lost it, and the one who set out to reclaim it had never returned. Back into our unexamined selves we slunk, until she arrived at our door. (140)”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“The question ocasionally invents the answer. (142)”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror