With all those stars in the sky, why isn't there enough light for us to see by? We stumble like blinded sheep. As you can see, it is clouding over. The stars can't pierce that gloom; they just wait it out. That isn't the stars' fault. It is their custom to stay heavenly. They should come down closer to the earth. Well, ask them politely.
Boq sat down, and shook his head, as if bewildered by the apparition of Elphaba.
He spoke in one of the American accents; Lydia couldn't distinguish among them. To her they all sounded dry and tinny. Almost quack-like.
What a world I've come up through, said Liir to himself. Oh, what a world, what a world.
Tell me to mind my own business, tell me to go fuck myself, to piss, off, go on, say it, but don't tell me nothing's wrong.
When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil, and maybe splits apart and multiplies.
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.
His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.
The world was a set of alternations, resistance and persistence, writ up in lake and the distant Alpine peaks of eastern Switzerland. In fact, the world was no easier to understand than Bach.
It isn't hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.
Your life and times don't drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).
You're in the finest hands. He's a very capable soldier. He is an old man with a white beard. He is a young man inside, and strong.
Every child makes its peace with abandonment. That's called growing up.
What's the different between a shooting star and a falling house?" "One which is propitious grants delicious wishes, the other which is vicious squishes witches.
I had written children's books for 14 years before I published 'Wicked.' And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.
I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, buy I don't know the way out.
There were more ways to live than the ones given by one's superiors.
While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon.
What will I do if I find myself with a heart?" "Lose it constantly, I imagine.
The question ocasionally invents the answer.
You confuse not speaking with not listening.
To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.
You can't be said to have properly established yourself in a place until you have been seen there.
A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him -so why bother?- but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible.
There may be no city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.
Everything changes you, and you change everything.
I do not deny that you overwhelm me with your beauty. You are the moon in the season of shadow light; you are the fruit of the candlewood tree; you are the phoenix in circles of flight --.
That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness-and life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same.
He has added inches and fullness to his beard since his last visit. I'll say no more.
Use your talent at sorcery, don't be used by it.
She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands-as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her own way.
Very few things in the world are certain, but morning is one of them.
The years peeled slowly off, one by one, or perhaps dozens at a time.
She lived and breathed, Brrr knew, with a high tolerance for detachment - like a lake jellyfish floating in a glass casket, oblivious of japing crowds.
The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness... Women are weaker, but their weakness is full of cunning and an equally rigid moral certainty. Since their arena is smaller, their capacity for real damage is less alarming.
Good gracious, dear, all of life is a spell. You know that.
Anyone who can be home anywhere really has no home at all.
I don't like work like that. I am the silent partner. I work through events, I live on the sidelines, I dabble in causes and effects, I watch how the misbegotten creatures of this world live their lives.
Approval is overrated...Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without.
Those who sit in the house of grief will someday sit in the garden.
No doubt Noah offered his wife that olive branch. Forty days in a boat with those animals to clean up after? A peace offering likely all that stood between their marriage and bloody murder.
The tedious never die; that's what makes them tedious.
When you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even it it's a moronic proclamation ... Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.
The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.
I believe in the floor. I put it in place and I walk on it. Faith is a floor. If you don't work at making it for yourself, you have nothing to walk on.
A capacity for interiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation to squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hollowness. The syndrome especially plagues anyone who lives behind a mask...A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I know what I know?
But who could teach daughters how to fly? Parents were by definition earthbound, grub eaters, feet in their own coffins, by dint of being parents.
The answer of course, is that the clock isn't meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.
She looked as if she'd swallowed an assortment of her own hangnails.
