A Lion Among Men Quotes

“Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him -so why bother?- but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“He knew about being alone. The weather was always cold there.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn’t as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“Your transparency is just another one of your disguises, isn't it?”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“Men were beasts. Everyone knew that.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“I'm not involved in shame. Morals are learned in childhood, and I didn't have any such holiday called childhood.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“We live in our tales of ourselves. . . and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls. . .”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“I have the distinct feeling I'm not in Oz anymore,' said Brrr.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“He was not so lucky. He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“He didn’t remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again.
Everything was not merely relative, it was--how to put it? --relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“The unvisited grannies, in stone houses by the wheat field, can't remember their husbands or children. They worry their hands, though, hands that could do with a rinsing. The grannies think:
We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn't as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“I was quite a looker in my time," she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know she must be hideous?

"Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“Brrr, who had never admired books particularly...didn't remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men