"Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents."

"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."

"So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste."

"Of course. You get everything from books."

"People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of."

"What's big, thick, makes the earth move, and wants to have its way with you?" "I don't know, but can you introduce me?"

"It's been a long, rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness."

"And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe."

"It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?"

"I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I'd rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one."

"Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not, the whole point of conversations was flow."

"In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place."

"Isn't that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger."

"The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory."

"O beautiful, to make escapeAnd leave this world behind.Had I to stay another dayI'd lose my fucking mind!"

"Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page " but then the world is the same way, isn't it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition."

"At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change."

"The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace."

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

"I have always felt like a pawn... My skin color's been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life's work of my own, I haven't found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that."

"The world was floods above and fire below."

"Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do."

"Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life."

"A world emerging, daily, out of nothing, a world that we trust to resemble what we've seen previously. We should know better."

"When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking."

"Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are."

"Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence."

"Come what may and hell to pay."

"Nothing in the Grimmerie on how to depose a tyrant - nothing useful... Nothing there that described why men and women could turn out so horrible. Or so wonderful - if that ever happens anymore."

"I like to think I'm a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions."

"I care as much as I can, but I don't spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve."

"Don't wish,"said Rain, "don't start. Wishing only..."

"He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome."

"Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping."

"I hate New Year's Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven't yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn't matter."

"If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it."

"When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn't any reclaiming it or revising it."

"No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it."

"You can't be said to have properly established yourself in a place until you have been seen there."

"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."

"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."

"Her head had turned quickly away...Not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence."

"Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away."

"The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew."

"The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase."

"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."

"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."

"Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing -- by dint of ignorance and innocence -- that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way."

"Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history."

"There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's."