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.

One never knows 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...

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...

We don’t get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience...

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

As the first hard drops of rain fell, the Witch caught sight, not of the girl’s face, but of the shoes. Her sister’s shoes. They sparkled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkled like yellow...

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...

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

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

Glinda waved dismissively. Then she tucked her hand against her mouth and bit her knuckles. It was hard to tell if her pretty ways were studied or innate. “Oh, oh,” she managed, “I don’t know...

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

But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him “Yero, my hero,” and that melted his heart.

Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.

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...

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 beauty of the day is the only thing that doesn’t fade in time. Day after day, such beauty revives itself.

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

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...

What had survived – maybe all that had survived of Trism – was Liir’s sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell...

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…

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

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

She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn’t smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It’s something else....

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...

My job is to protect you, Lady Glinda even if you are loosing your mind.

Where I’m from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren’t true… we call it history.

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.

People always did like to talk, didn’t they? That’s why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are...

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...

I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral,” said the Wizard. “In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In...

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

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.

Galinda didn’t see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though...

Are you an aberration to your species?’ she cried. ‘Cats don’t look for approval!

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

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...

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

But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn’t done before.

To the grim poor there need be no pourquoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice...