Hiddensee Quotes

“You might forget a story, but you can never unhear a story.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“All paths lead to the same place, and that place is whatever comes next.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“Is it only in childhood that we are capable of taking in the whole world?
What does it do to us that we briefly have that privilege? And, then, what harm , when the fund of novelty in human experience runs dry?”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“Lost is not an address, it's not permission to fail, it's not an excuse.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“What’s missing from the literature of our species are the stories of the peasants. The filthy illiterate. Those with no firm address, no surname. No one to impress, nothing to lose. But the poor tell stories, too.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“Chopin’s theme, a simple descending descant the first time round, articulated itself in the repeat with nuanced embellishment. It was music remembering itself. It meant something different, something more, to hear those simple phrases repeated so soon, qualified by chromatic variations. Clarifications. Not redundancy, but a hypothesis about how consolation works. A second chance at getting it. A second chance at life.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“One day he would finish the job of dying he'd begun in childhood/”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“Those born dull remain dull”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“Whispering can disguise the shape of syllables, but not of mood.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“I would leave me were I him. I would leave myself if I could.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“The toys can help in the battle."

"Mother Ginger? I doubt it!"

"Never underestimate the value of a mother in wartime. She has the most to fight for.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“Death might be the only way forward for someone. Or it might seem so at the time”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“No one knows his own story, and that’s the way of it, unless you make it up yourself,” she said at last.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“So speak quickly. What have you made of your life?”

How to answer such a question.

“A long road toward a retreating horizon,” he ventured. “Like everyone else’s.”

“No horizon but heaven.”

“That must be true for you, good father. But the rest of us aren’t so sure of our itineraries.”

“Then you become your own destination, Dirk. That is what happens. As long as you are a person of conscience—of merit—one who makes the attempt—you head ever toward the geography of yourself...”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“Those boys and us—we only seem to be sharing a life here. The young are entirely separate. They are someplace else right now. They won’t join us in our lives, really, until they are grown. And by then, who will they become? People I don’t know. And I may not even be here when they get here.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“You only seem to read in yourself what you have not.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“The vagabond human spirit requires a chart of possibilities in order to keep putting one foot in front of another, keep licensing the next heartbeat after the previous.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“We are all migrants. We are exiled from the place where meaning meant something.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“By that token, you might forget an event, but you can never go back to living as you did before its hidden influence was applied upon you.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“You might forget a story, but you can never unhear a story. By that token, you might forget an event, but you can never go back to living as you did before its hidden influence was applied upon you.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“I’m not good, I’m just quiet,”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“Mostly his mind wandered. But it didn’t have anywhere special to wander to.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“You might forget an event but you can never go back to living as you did before it's influence was applied upon you”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“But those are legends and lore; they are faith and fictions. Not everyone is a character in a story.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“How many times in a life, he thought, will I lie down in a darkness whose character I cannot imagine, to see what daybreak reveals of my new circumstances? Or is that every day of my life?”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“The old gods steal secretly into our own times.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“All children want to know the hidden meaning of the world, until they grow up and resign themselves to it being unknowable.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“The wild forests of his youth—perhaps they no longer existed. The world was too strictly regulated now. The idea of being able to find his way back to that waldhütte where he had been raised—to the extent he had been raised—was as impossible as Nastaran’s need to return to her lost childhood in Persia. It couldn’t happen.
Idle thoughts for a tedious journey. No value could attach to revisiting youth, even if he could manage it somehow.
Still, the notion returned, and he had to throw it down repeatedly, like bread crumbs in some old tale—hoping the wild thrushes would eat them up. Despite the romantic stories that had become so popular—even Felix’s little boys adored the sweetened renditions of Grimm as served up by stern Frau Gouvernante—sometimes one wandered into the woods because the ominous woods were safer than home was.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“I think it was your eye-patch that frightened him,” said the boy, as his younger brother, a sprite in blue satin, came trudging forward with his thumb in his mouth. “Why do you wear it?”
“Yes, why?” asked the one who must be Sebastian.
“Boys, such a personal question!” said Felix. “Shame on you.”
“But he’s a person, so of course the question is personal,” replied Günther, covering his own eye with a patch of fingers.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

“But it was your voice I was responding to. At least in part. The music in your voice.”
The maître d’ approached to supply a bottle of sweet wine before they began to talk again, a few moments later.
“So you see,” Dirk said finally. “I was ready to dance.”
“You’re the one with the eye-patch. But how blind of me.”
“Ah well. You need only have asked.”
“You could have asked, too, you know.”
“Me?” Dirk snorted. “I don’t have that kind of language in me.”
“If you need to speak, you learn the language.”
“Touché. Someday I will learn.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker