“Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“He knew about being alone. The weather was always cold there.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn’t as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“Your transparency is just another one of your disguises, isn't it?”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“I have the distinct feeling I'm not in Oz anymore,' said Brrr.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“Men were beasts. Everyone knew that.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“I'm not involved in shame. Morals are learned in childhood, and I didn't have any such holiday called childhood.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“We live in our tales of ourselves. . . and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls. . .”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“He 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, quote from A Lion Among Men
“When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“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.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“The unvisited grannies, in stone houses by the wheat field, can't remember their husbands or children. They worry their hands, though, hands that could do with a rinsing. The grannies think:
We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn't as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“I was quite a looker in my time," she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know she must be hideous?
"Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from A Lion Among Men
“Brrr, 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, quote from A Lion Among Men
Gregory Maguire
Born place: in Albany, New York, The United States
Born date June 9, 1954
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“Life would be so much easier if fictional boys were real.”
― Susane Colasanti, quote from Keep Holding On
“Bending his head over hers, Leo murmured, "When I give you away at the altar, Bea, I want you to remember something. I'm not really giving you away. I'm merely allowing him the chance to love you as much as the rest of us do.”
― Lisa Kleypas, quote from Love in the Afternoon
“If you believe some of the old stories, earth natives have been around in one form or another since the beginning of the world. They were the top predators then and they’re the top predators now because they change as the world changes, absorbing qualities from new species of predators without losing the essence of what they are.”
― Anne Bishop, quote from Vision in Silver
“In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.”
― Chaim Potok, quote from Davita's Harp
“I've just fallen on some bad luck and landed jelly side down.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven
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Joseph and His Broth...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
