Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
By Swyx on July 31st, 2009
Gregory Maguire
- Prologue: On the Yellow Brick Road
- Munchkinlanders
- Gillikin
- City of Emeralds
- In the Vinkus
- The Murder and Its Afterlife
Wicked - Excellent book, incredible musical
Great Quotes:
Prologue: On the Yellow Brick Road
“In historical events great men – so called – are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the last possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.” – Leo Tolstoi, War and Peace
Munchkinlanders
The Root of Evil
The Clock of the Time Dragon
The Birth of a Witch
“Brother Frexspar,” said Bfee, the mayor of Rush Margins, “could you perhaps tone down your harangue until we get a chance to see what fresh new form temptation might take? We’ve hardly had such a good chance to prove ourselves against sin! We’re looking forward to- to the spiritual test of it all.”
Maladies and Remedies
“The girl’s eyes tracked her back and forth. They were brown and rich, the color of overturned earth, flecked with mica.”
“Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.”
The Quadling Glassblower
“Turtle Heart was unbearably beautiful. Melena dragon-snaked with him, covered him with her mouth, poured him in her hands, heated and cooled and shaped his luminosity. He filled her emptiness.”
Geographies of the Seen and the Unseen
Child’s Play
Darkness Abroad
“Horrors,” she said again, looking without binocular vision, staring at the glass in which her parents and Nanny could make out nothing but darkness. “Horrors.”
Gillikin
Galinda
Boq
“Neither of you will understand what the other is saying,” said Elphaba calmly. “I’m a Munchkinlander by birth anyway, if not by upbringing, and I’m a girl by accident if not by uchoice. I’m the natural arbiter between you two. I don’t believe you can get along without me. In fact if I leave the garden you’ll cease to decipher each other’s language entirely. She speaks the tongue of Rich, you speak Clotted Poor.”
But Boq could not listen to this blather. He could not take in the story of a live Nail while a dead Goat was being prayed over byu hysterical factulry members. He could not watch the departure of the corpse, when they trundled it away. For it had been clear, with a glimpse of the Goat’s still face, that whatever had given the doctor his enlivening character had already disappeared.
The Charmed Circle
Perhaps every accidental cluster of people has a short period of grace, in between the initial shyness and prejudice on the one hand and eventual repugnance and betrayal on the other.
“At any rate, the Wizard needs some agents. He requires a few generals. In the long run. Some people with managing skills. Some people with gumption. In a word, women.”
City of Emeralds
She handed him his opera cape, and held out her hand to shake his. He grabbed her hand, and looked up into her face, which just for a second had fallen open. What he saw there made him chill and hot flash, in dizzying simultaneity, with the shape and scale of its need.
Love makes hunters of us all.
In the Vinkus
The Voyage Out
“To the grim poor there need be no pour quoi 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 for her – is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?”
As night fell, everyone seemed more alert, out of fear and excitement. The skies throbbed with turquioise, even at midnight. Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into a hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing.
The Jasper Gates of Kiamo Ko
By the smallest gesture – a sucking in of her abdoment and a squaring of her shoulders – Two betrayed the foundation of her position: How could he have succumbed ot this Glinda’s charms if he had been able to resist his own sisters-in-law?
Uprisings
On her way out, Elphie thought about going to say good-bye to her father, and then decided against it. She had said to him everything that she could bring herself to say. THey had ganged up on her, in the claustrophobic, loving way of families, and she wanted no more of it.
The Murder and Its Afterlife
“I’m no pawn,” said Glinda. “I take all the credit in the world for my own foolishness. Good gracious dear, all of life is a spell. You know that. But you do have some choice.”
“You’re not wicked,” said Boq.
“How do you know? It’s been so long,” said the Witch, but she smiled at him.
Boq returned the smile, warmly. “Glinda used her glitter beads, and you used your exotic looks and background, but weren’t you jsut doing the same thing, trying to maximize what you had in order to get what you wanted? People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.” He sighed. “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
The Witch had waited fifteen years, but her timing was off by five minutes.
“Evil isn’t a thing, it’s not a person, it’s an attribute like beauty…”
“It’s metaphysical, essentially; the corruptibility of creation-”
“Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing one another pain, no more no less…”
“Evil is an act, not an appetite… Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.”
“Oh no, evil is repressing that appetite. I never repress any appetite.”
“The real thing about evil,” said the Witch at the doorway, “isn’t any of what you said. You figure out one side of it – the human side, say – and the eternal side goes into shadow. What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiriy is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.”
An instant of sharp pain before the numbness. The world was floods above and fire below. If there was such a thing as a soul, the sould had gambled on a sort of baptism, and had it won? The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting int he body without invitation.
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.
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