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Out of Oz

Gregory Maguire

Top 10 Best Quotes

“I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.”

“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 anything. [...] 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 revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.”

“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 necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.”

“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.”

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

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

“Of course. You get everything from books.”

“She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.”

“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 of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression - unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir's heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism's glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing.”

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

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Book Keywords:

memories, rain, wish, reading, lust, loneliness, fantasy, home, growing-up, lovers, books, out-of-oz, gestures, knowledge, longing, isolation, birds, wicked, lost-love, love, expressions

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