Wicked (A Third Time)

I've set out for the third year in a row to read the Wicked Years by Gregory Maguire, starting of course with "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" (406 pages). I guess I'm ramping up for the fourth and final installment, "Out of Oz," due to hit stores November 1st. My first and second impressions of the novel can be found here and here. Rather than going over ground already covered in previous posts, I thought it would be fun just to list some quotes from the book that came to my attention.

Melena on Frex: "For a man who condemned worldly pleasures he ate with elegance. She loved to watch the arabesque of fingers and two forks. She suspected that beneath his righteous asceticism he possessed a hidden longing for the easy life."

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

"'Perhaps our time here is limited,' said Frex, sighing with contentment and clasping his arms behind his head - the typical male response to happiness, thought Melena: to predict its demise."

"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 what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet."

"Galinda always felt as if she couldn't see the whole picture. It was disconcerting, and to her credit at least Galinda felt inside herself the ripping apart of some valuable fabric - was it integrity? - when she sat in Madame Morrible's parlor and drank the perfect tea."

"I've told you before, I don't comprehend religion, although conviction is a concept I'm beginning to get. In any case, someone with a real religious conviction is, I propose, a religious convict, and deserves locking up."

Elphaba: "'I should say you'll look back on this summer and cringe. She may be lovely, Boq - no, she is lovely, I agree - but you're worth a dozen of her.' At his shocked expression she threw up her hands. 'Not to me! I don't mean me! Please, that stricken look! Spare me!'"

Elphaba: "I love you so much, Fiyero, you just don't understand: Being born with a talent or an inclination for goodness is the aberration."

Fiyero: "He did not approve of anarchy (well, he knew he was in lazy doubt about everything; doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction)."

"'What's your beef?' said the Cow, in a dark humor."

Nessie to Elphaba: "Well, you can have the shoes, my dear - over my dead body."

"The alien girl - she called herself Dorothy - was by virtue of survival elevated to living sainthood. The dog was merely annoying."

"And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no after, in the ever after of a Witch, there is no happily; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is - alas, or perhaps thank mercy - no telling. She was dead, dead and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice."

"And there the wicked old Witch stayed for a good long time."
"And did she ever come out?"
"Not yet."

Again, one of my favorite reads, at least in the past three years. I enjoy it more and take more from the story with each reading.