Out of Oz Quotes

“I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“They'd never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they'd been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Don't wish,"said Rain, "don't start. Wishing only...”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Of course. You get everything from books.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“What had survived - maybe all that had survived of Trism - was Liir's sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression - unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir's heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism's glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life and the older you get- the more specifically you harvest- the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“O beautiful, to make escape
And leave this world behind.
Had I to stay another day
I'd lose my fucking mind...”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“When you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even it it's a moronic proclamation ... Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“[Puggles] "What population signs on willingly for slavery?"

"You mean other than wives?" [Glinda]”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“This is what fun is like," said Rain, almost to herself.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Every choice brings wisdom in its wake. If you got to have the wisdom first, it wouldn't be a choice--just policy”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Is that, in the end - that capacity to hurt - the most essential ingredient for a ruler?”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“As years pass, and the abundance of the future is depleted, the crux of old mistakes and the cost of old choices are ever recalibrated. Resentment, the interest in umbrage derived from being wronged, is computed minute by minute, savagely, however you try to ignore it.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“I never talk about the end game." He winked at her. "I've lived so long without death that I've stopped believing in it.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“...Where shall I say you've gone?"
She threw an arm about airily. "Oh, way up high. Over the rainbow somewhere, I guess.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Every child makes its peace with abandonment. That's called growing up.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Everyone has a right to love the land that gave them the things they need to live. It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think... that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to allow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful too.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“It's been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Do good though, will you?" She blinked brightly at the green girl. "If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me?”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“My job is to protect you, Lady Glinda even if you are loosing your mind.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“In her time Nor Tigelaar had faced insurrectionists and collaborationists and war profiteers. She'd endured abduction and prison and self-mutilation. She'd sold herself in sex not for cash but for military information that might come in handy to the resistance, and in so doing she'd come across a rum variety of human types.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz