The Wicked Years Complete Collection Quotes

“History crawls along on the peg legs of small individual lives,” said Frex, “and at the same time larger eternal forces converge. You can’t attend to both arenas at once.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“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, now a spilled sandwich, now a fishhook in the face.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“There was much to hate in this world, and too much to love.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“It is such an uncomfortable feeling to know one is a fool.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“You’re always complaining,” Manek said, giving him a hand. “That’s why we don’t like you, you know.” “Well, everybody’s mean to me,” Liir said.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“we’re not old yet, but we’re old enough to be old friends already, aren’t we?”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“There are bound to be popular uprisings—the stupid, senseless kind, in which strong dumb people enjoy getting killed for the sake of political changes that’ll be rolled back within the decade. Adds such meaning to meaningless lives, don’t you think? One can’t imagine any other reason for it.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“If I can’t predict what we’ll have for pudding, how can I predict someone’s affections?”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“I don’t read very well. So I don’t think I think very well either.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“A LITTLE PATIENCE, and we shall see the reign of
witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people,
recovering their true spirit, restore their government
to its true principles. —Thomas Jefferson, 1798”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“Now we’re the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we’re in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“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. To the ignorant everything is spectacle these days.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are the most themselves are the victims.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, it might be the best way to die.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“Oh, wary, well, I’m wary of the water I drink, it might be poisoned,” said Glinda. “That doesn’t mean I stop drinking water.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming

“Frex had a notion that she wasn’t sorry to see him go off from time to time, so that she could be glad to see him come back.”
― Gregory Maguire, The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked / Son of a Witch / Out of Oz / A Lion Among Men: A Special Collection of the Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture—Now Streaming