Wicked

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it—we’re slow learners, we women—we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production. But men don’t dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the death. Ah, we’re slow learners, Nanny countered. But they can’t learn at all.
• “History crawls along on the peg legs of small individual lives,” said Frex, “and at the same time larger eternal forces converge. You can’t attend to both arenas at once.” “Our child may not have a small life.”
• 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.
• The conductor punched the ticket, and said, “You’re the rare beast that can afford to travel first class.” “Oh,” said the goat, “I object to the term beast. But the laws still allow my traveling in first class, I presume?” “Money’s money,” said the conductor, without ill will, punching Galinda’s ticket and returning it to her. “No, money’s not money,” said the goat, “not when my ticket cost double what the young lady’s did. In this case, money is a visa. I happen to have it.”
• Galinda didn’t often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversation was flow.
• “My father taught me a lot,” Elphaba said slowly. “He was very well educated indeed. He taught me to read and write and think, and more. But not enough. I just think, like our teachers here, that if ministers are effective, they’re good at asking questions to get you to think. I don’t think they’re supposed to have the answers. Not necessarily.”
• “Well,” said Madame Morrible in a carrying tone, “one expects poetry, if it is Poetry, to offend. It is the Right of Art.”
• “Well, your opinion is as good as hers, I think,” said Elphaba. “That’s the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?”
• “How could he be persuaded not to? The Wizard has dissolved the Hall of Approval indefinitely. I don’t believe, Elphie, that the Wizard is open to entertaining arguments, even by as august an Animal as Doctor Dillamond.” “But of course he must be. He’s a man in power, it’s his job to consider changes in knowledge. When Doctor Dillamond has his proof, he’ll write to the Wizard and begin to lobby for change.
• She smiled wanly. “Boq, does she really mean that much to you?” “She is my world,” he answered. “Your world is too small if she is it.”
• In sorcery the next day Glinda asked Miss Greyling to explain something. “How could Doctor Nikidik’s Extract of Biological Intention or whatever it was, how could it fall under the heading of life sciences when it behaved like a master spell? What really is the difference between science and sorcery?”
• “Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn’t rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled”—at this she jabbed herself with a hair pin and yelped—“it is Art.
• 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.
• “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 the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical.” “If not immoral, then what word can I use to imply wrong?” said Elphaba. “Try mysterious and then relax a little. The thing is, my green girlie, it is not for a girl, or a student, or a citizen to assess what is wrong. This is the job of leaders, and why we exist.”
• “I’ve a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.”
• 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 lives in folk memory is truer than how some artsy poet says it. In folk memory evil always predates good.”
• Elphie had come to think, back in Shiz, that as women wore cologne, men wore proofs: to secure their own sense of themselves, and thus to be attractive.
• “When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are the most themselves are the victims.”
• hostess, willing her to accept the facts.
• Nessarose is a strict unionist. They don’t go in for—blood sacrifice—” “Times change,” said the Cow. “And she’s got a population of ill-educated, nervous subjects to pacify. What, pray tell, works better than ritual slaughter?”
• “The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments,” said Frex.
• “Poets are just as responsible for empire building as any other professional hacks.”
• “I shall pray for your soul,” promised Nessarose. “I shall wait for your shoes,” Elphie answered.
• But it wasn’t the visible terrain she was really seeing. It was the world at large. The character it seemed to have, how it seemed to refer to itself. How could Nessarose believe in the Unnamed God? Behind every aspect of the world is another aspect of the world.
• “Sir,” she said, “I think you are a very bad wizard.” “And you,” he answered, stung, “are only a caricature of a witch.”
• 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.”
• Boq, Glinda, even her father, Frex: how disappointing they all seemed now. Had these folks deteriorated in virtue since their youth, or had she been too naive then to see them for what they were?
• By hooking up with the Emerald City, she sold out all her students who believed that a liberal education meant learning to think for themselves.
• “I think it improper to talk about evil all during a meal. It spoils the digestion.” “Oh, but come,” the Witch said, “is it only in youth that we can have the nerve to ask ourselves such serious questions?” “Well, I stick with my suggestion,” said Avaric. “Evil isn’t doing bad things, it’s feeling bad about them afterward. There’s no absolute value to behavior.
  • Extraordinary Person Philosophy
• “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. Or vice versa. It’s like the old saw: 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 inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.”
• “We can only hope so,” she said. She wondered, faintly, if it was immoral to raise children in the habit of hope. Was it not, in the end, all the harder for them to adjust to the reality of how the world worked?
• “Give it the Maguire treatment,” they said, by which I assumed they meant “Indulge in a little petty larceny as you are known to do, steal someone’s story and make something new out of it.”
• I relish this quote from E. M. Forster, an apologetic about the limits and the range of his writing life: “My defense at any Last Judgment would be, ‘I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with.’
• I bet most of our hearts opened wide with the hope for an experience of life that was larger than our own private prison of here and now. That’s how we became readers, after all.
• I couldn’t read any fiction. Fiction couldn’t hold a metaphoric candle to the literal firestorm of reality.
• One of my articles of faith is a phrase from the British moral philosopher Roger Scruton. He said: “The consolation of the imaginary is not imaginary consolation.”
• Exiled from the World at Hand, Dante, Malory, Milton, and Bunyan were liberated into being able to conceive of a map to the World Next Door.
• In the youth of our species, we believed in the island of the Cyclops, the underworld of Hades, the corridors of the Minotaur’s maze, and that the dark wood in the center of Dante’s life opened into Purgatory. Maps of otherness. Then comes the Enlightenment, then comes Darwin, and the old maps are folded up and stored in the attic as curiosities of the white-headed generation, like their walking sticks and reticules and collapsible spectacles. We say, Did they really believe this stuff literally? The old darlings. The old duffers. But on some level we still need to believe. The World Next Door is crucial to our ability to survive the World at Hand. We need a Middle-earth when there is an Al Qaeda. We need to go there and back again so we can see more clearly where we really stand, and what to do next.
• E. M. Forster, a reprise: “My defense at any Last Judgment would be, ‘I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with.’ ”
• Story allows at one and the same time both permanence and change.
• That magic is often nothing more than human charity, a common stick painted up to look like a magic wand, a map drawn on the back of a packet of freeze-dried emergency rations. Good enough. We can use it. In time, maybe one of us will survive to write a new map out of our days of darkness. Not a moment too soon. By all available evidence, our kind is still in need of maps.