top of page
.png){kind=small}
"And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes
"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
"I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once-and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."
Explore more quotes by Gregory Maguire
"The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious."
"One never knows 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 the very least question of definitions."
"The story of 'Mirror Mirror' is in many ways a story about evolution. It's about the evolution of a child into an adult. It's about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. It's about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason."
"I think that's shameful, even if it's just a story, to propose an afterlife for evil... Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. It's shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward."
"Children played at those stories, they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them."
"Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history."
"Oh, mercy, there is nothing monstrously ugly about you. Ruth may be unpleasing, but you are merely plain. If anything, it's my beauty that's monstrous, for it sweeps away any other aspect of my character."
"Night-time is being brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away."
"Immortality is a chancy thing, it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is."
bottom of page