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

Come what may and hell to pay.

The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man.

This is what fun is like,” said Rain, almost to herself.

Of course. You get everything from books.

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

Isn’t that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger–

you have to plant an accidental.

Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven’t wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give...

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.

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.

It’s the work that’s important, not the individual who does it.

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

Well, I learned to cook. At my age,” she told him. “What’s next? Art therapy? Anyway, I’ve had quite a time of it this summer, and who knows what eases down on any road. Come,...

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...

I like the sound of words, but I don’t ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.

By so giving up, of course, it renews itself- that is the secret

There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach...

It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.

In the end, all disguises must drop.

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.

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

Do good though, will you?” She blinked brightly at the green girl. “If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me?

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make...

It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.

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...

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.

Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met

It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.

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?

The world was floods above and fire below

We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out.

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...

You need my help? What for? Bread, cash, a fake identity to help you slip sideways through the cracks? Tell me what you need, tell me why I should help, and I’ll see what I...

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.

The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.

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.

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...

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it’s gone.

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...

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...

Maybe that’s what growing up means, in the end – you go far enough in the direction of – somewhere – and you realise that you’ve neutered the capacity of the term home to mean...

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

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.

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

He lingered at the door, and said, ‘The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you want?’…She couldn’t say forgiveness, not to Liir....

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

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...

What is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it.