Barr, 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

Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.

— Gregory Maguire

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

But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

— Gregory Maguire

But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him "Hero, my hero," and that melted his heart.

— Gregory Maguire

But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.

— Gregory Maguire

By so giving up, of course, it renews itself-that is the secret

— Gregory Maguire

Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they've imagined us.

— Gregory Maguire

Come what may and hell to pay.

— Gregory Maguire

Cross a man, and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on - or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense

— Gregory Maguire