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"No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it."
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"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."
"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."
"Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes;It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music."
"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."
"I am no poet. I do not love words for the sake of words. I love words for what they can accomplish. Similarly, I am no arithmetician. Numbers that speak only of numbers are of little interest to me."
Explore more quotes by Gregory Maguire
"They'd never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they'd been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love."
"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."
"Everyone has a right to love the land that gave them the things they need to live. It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think... that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to allow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful too."
"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 someone 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."
"It isn't hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow."
"The real thing about evil, you figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret."
"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."
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