Peter S. Beagle Quotes

He thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.

Lir said, "It is my right. A hero is entitled to his happy ending, when it comes at last." But Schmendrick answered, "This is not the end, either for you or for her.

There are no happy endings, because nothing ends.

A Clock is not time; it's numbers and springs. Pay it no mind.

The woman I loved died because I did not love her enough - what greater sin is there than that?" (Uncle Chaim and Aunt Fifke and the Angel)

there never is a happy ending because nothing ever ends.

...but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes.

Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard's castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts.

The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.

What use is wizardry if it cannot save a Unicorn?

I am what I am. I would tell you what you want to know if I could, for you have been kind to me. But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.

She said, "I will go no farther." "There is no choice. We can only go on." The magician said again. "We can only go on.

As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn't say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.

...because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far.

You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.

Sparrows and cats will live in my shoe, Sooner than I will live with you. Fish will come walking out of the sea, Sooner than you will come back to me.

But I'm always dreaming, even when I'm awake; it is never finished." -the Lady Amalthea, from The Last Unicorn

Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.

We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.

For a moment she turned in a circle, staring at her hands, which she held high and useless, close to her breast. She bobbed and shambled like an ape doing a trick, and her face was the silly, bewildered face of a joker's victim. And yet she could make no move that was not beautiful. Her trapped terror was more lovely than any joy that Molly had ever seen, and that was the most terrible thing about it.

A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.

The unicorn halted in her slow, desperate round of the cage, realizing for the first time that the magician understood her speech. He smiled, and she saw that his face was frighteningly young for a grown man-untraveled by time, unvisited by grief or wisdom. "I know you," he said.

Avicenna California...Museum of my twisted youth, vault of my dearest and most disgusting memories.

Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.

Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.

Whatever can die is beautiful — more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?

I know how to live here, I know how everything smells, and tastes, and is. What could I ever search for in the world, except this again?

- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.

But I still feel I waste a lot of time leaning on my elbow and thinking to myself, 'alright sucker, now what?'

What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain-- What is gone is gone.

No," he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king's voice... whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give.

And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where where you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?

Sing to me," she said. "That would be valiant, to raise your voice in this dark, lonely place, and it will be useful as well. Sing to me, sing loudly-drown out my dreams, keep me from remembering whatever wants me to remember it. Sing to me, my lord prince, if it please you. It may not seem a hero's task, but I would be glad of it.

The horns came riding in like the rainbow masts of silver ships.

...no place is more enchanted than where a unicorn has been born.

All lives are composed of two basic elements," the squirrel said, "purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rain—this is nothing beside a life without poetry.

I love whom I love," Prince Lir repeated firmly. "You have no power over anything that matters.

You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.

You were the one who taught me," he said. "I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling. I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you.

I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.

Only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power.

Haggard, I would not be you for all the world," he declared. "You have let your doom in by the front door, although it will not depart that way. (...) Farewell, poor Haggard, farewell!

I am infected with life and will die of it in time.

Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to - you write because you can't not write. The rest is show-business. I can't state that too strongly. Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you're writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business.

The tune was wailing and mournful, almost flagrantly so, and the total effect was of a heartbroken piccolo being parted forever from its bagpipe lover.

Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of anything. Whatever you have been, you are mine now. I can hold you.

Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger, And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.