Peter S. Beagle Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Peter S. Beagle.
Famous Quotes By Peter S. Beagle
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. — Peter S. Beagle
If a man loved me, I would have talked myself into loving him, and I would have loved him very deeply after a while. — Peter S. Beagle
The king is always watching her out of his pale eyes, wondering what she is, and the king's son wounds himself with loving her and wonders who she is. And every day she searches the sea and the sky, the castle and the courtyard, the keep and the king's face, for something she cannot always remember. What is it, what is it that she is seeking in this strange place? She knew a moment ago, but she was forgotten. — Peter S. Beagle
We don't steal from the rich and give to the poor. We steal from the poor because they can't fight back
most of them
and the rich take from us because they could wipe us out in a day. — Peter S. Beagle
But I must go on," said the Lady Amalthea, "for it is never finished. Even when I wake, I cannot tell what is real, and what I am dreaming as I move and speak and eat my dinner. I remember what cannot have happened, and forget something that is happening to me know. People look at me as though I should know them, and I do know them in the dream, and always the fire draws me nearer, though I am awake - — Peter S. Beagle
We give them different names, those nights lit only by fire and the moon, depending on the country and the calendar, but we know what they are. They call up the world that was before the Lord came down among us; the world where good and evil were not so certain, so fixed as they are today, where the known and the unheard-of could mingle as they chose ... where truth had its doubts, do you see?
(By Moonlight) — Peter S. Beagle
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? — Peter S. Beagle
Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things."
"Who knows? Times change. Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?"
"No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns. — Peter S. Beagle
- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact. — Peter S. Beagle
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. — Peter S. Beagle
You don't have to believe in Hell. All you need is to hear someone who really does, who believes in it this minute, today, the way people believe in 1685 - all you have to do is see his face, his voice when he says the word ... and than you know that anyone who can imagine Hell has the power to make it real for other people. — Peter S. Beagle
She has a newness," he said. "Everything is for the first time. See how she moves, how she walks, how she turns her head - all for the first time, the first time anyone has ever done these things. See how she draws her breath and lets it go again, as though no one else in the world knew that air was good. It is all for her. If I learned that she had been born this very morning, I would only be surprised that she was so old. — Peter S. Beagle
That's the true test of a town, or of a king. A lord who cheats an ugly old witch will cheat his own folk by and by. Stop him while you can, before you grow used to him. — Peter S. Beagle
You may plant your acres again and raise up your fallen orchard and vineyards, but they will never flourish as they used to, never
until you learn to take joy in them, for no reason. — Peter S. Beagle
But some, a very come to the gods all on their own They find their way - long and far it is, sometimes - and they wander up to the altars, shy and clumsy and embarrassed and alone, and when they can get the words out, they say, 'Well. Here I am — Peter S. Beagle
The Lady Amalthea beckoned, and the cat wriggled all over, like a dog, but he would not come near ... She was offering her open palm to the crook-eared cat, but he stayed where he was, shivering with the desire to go to her" ... [later, Molly asked the cat] "Why were you afraid to let her touch you? I saw you. You were afraid of her."
"If she had touched me," he said very softly, "I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me but I could not let her. No cat will ... The price is more than a cat can pay. — Peter S. Beagle
Traditionally, people are always supposed to feel empty, devastated, when a god leaves them. Nobody seems to wonder how the god might feel. Leaving the only people who almost understood. — Peter S. Beagle
She leaned forward and put her arms around me. Sometimes it used to make me prickly when she did that, and I'd turn into a bag of knees and elbows. . . — Peter S. Beagle
Alarm clocks were going off in the city now. One after another, sometimes two or three together, they drove their small silver knives into the body of the great dream that sprawled naked on the housetops. Sensual, amiable, and defenseless as it was, it would still take a little while to die. — Peter S. Beagle
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. — Peter S. Beagle
After the third [San Miguel], I am likely to announce that all writing is fantasy anyway: that to set any event down in print is immediately to begin to lie about it, thank goodness; and that it's no less absurd and presumptuous to try on the skin of a bank teller than that of a Bigfoot or a dragon. — Peter S. Beagle
The Last Unicorn — Peter S. Beagle
I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches, and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch's door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story. Heroes know about order, about happy endings -- heroes know that some things are better than others. — Peter S. Beagle
The air was motionless, carved, a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth, molded while soft to fit every house and every human being on the earth, and now hardened forever so that no man could move and no air ever came through. The earth rumbled down its alley like a golden bowling ball, shining. — Peter S. Beagle
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. — Peter S. Beagle
You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact. Let it end here then, let the quest end. Is the world any the worse for losing the unicorns, and would it be any better if they were running free again? One good woman more in the world is worth every single unicorn gone. Let it end. Marry the prince and live happily ever after. The — Peter S. Beagle
Wisdom is finding joy in bewilderment — Peter S. Beagle
They broaden our outlook ... set us to looking inward ... — Peter S. Beagle
There's a phrase, "sitzfleisch", which means just plain sitting on your ass and getting it done. Just showing up for work. My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, "If the muse is late for work, start without her". You have to be there. You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you're probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow. — Peter S. Beagle
Haven't you ever been in a fairy tale before? — Peter S. Beagle
Oh, it's a beautiful day, it's an elegant, graceful day, and I'm sailing down the Strip in glamorous Las Vegas, on my motor scooter, in company with a certified illegal prostitute who loves poetry and remembers it. Sonofabitch, I'm a real writer! I used to worry about it, but no more. Life is good. — Peter S. Beagle
Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air. — Peter S. Beagle
Your topsoil's a disaster area - it's starved for nitrogen, it's been fertilized for years by the criminally insane, and whatever thief put in your irrigation system ought to be flogged through the fleet. — Peter S. Beagle
From that first moment of doubt, there was no peace for her; from the time she first imagined leaving her forest, she could not stand in one place without wanting to be somewhere else. She trotted up and down beside her pool, restless and unhappy. Unicorns are not meant to make choices. She said no, and yes, and no again, day and night, and for the first time she began to feel the minutes crawling over her like worms. — Peter S. Beagle
She touched you twice,' he said in a little while. 'The first touch was to bring you to life again, but the second was for you. — Peter S. Beagle
She heard hearts bounce, tears brewing, and breath going backward, but nobody said a word. By the sorrow and loss and sweetness in their faces she knew that they recognized her, and she accepted their hunger as her homage. She thought of the hunter's great-grandmother, and wondered what it must be like to grow old, and to cry. — Peter S. Beagle
How terrible to be forgotten by the god that made you, even if you're just a room. How could you love something that could do that anytime? — Peter S. Beagle
The unicorn was weary of human beings. Watching her companions as they slept, seeing the shadows of their dreams scurry over their faces, she would feel herself bending under the heaviness of knowing their names. Then she would run until morning to ease the ache: swifter than rain, swift as loss, racing to catch up with the time when she had known nothing at all but the sweetness of being herself. — Peter S. Beagle
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. — Peter S. Beagle
This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful? — Peter S. Beagle
There's a line in the Bible about perfect love casting out fear. That I don't know about, but orneriness will do it every time. — Peter S. Beagle
How can we delight in our good fortune when we know that it must end, and that one of us will end it? Every day makes us richer, and brings us one day nearer to our doom. — Peter S. Beagle
Her neck was long and slender, making her head seem smaller than it was, and the mane that fell almost to the middle of her back was as soft as dandelion fluff and as fine as cirrus. She had pointed ears and thin legs, with feathers of white hair at the ankles; and the long horn above her eyes shone and shivered with its own seashell light even in the deepest midnight. — Peter S. Beagle
Anyone can say he's a magician these days. The old standards are gone, the old values have been abandoned. Besides, a real magician has a beard. — Peter S. Beagle
Girls like poems better than dead dragons and magic swords, — Peter S. Beagle
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. — Peter S. Beagle
No," she said, answering his eyes. "I can never regret."[ ... ]"I can sorrow," she offered gently, "but it's not the same thing. — Peter S. Beagle
What use is wizardry if it cannot save a Unicorn? — Peter S. Beagle
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. — Peter S. Beagle
Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of anything. Whatever you have been, you are mine now. I can hold you. — Peter S. Beagle
It would be a crime to eat such a mouse!" he proclaimed everywhere. "An absolute, shameful, yummy crime. — Peter S. Beagle
He felt as if he had told a joke and they had missed the punchline and were leaning to him, wating for the kicker, the all-illuminating kicker that is found only in jokes; or as if someone had asked, "How you doing?" and the spring-and-strap arrangement in him had rusted and broken and he would never again be able to answer perfunctory questions the way other people did. — Peter S. Beagle
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. — Peter S. Beagle
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. — Peter S. Beagle
She was one woman who knew what to do with a slight moral edge. The — Peter S. Beagle
Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl. — Peter S. Beagle
I know exactly how you feel," Schmendrick said eagerly. The unicorn looked at him out of dark, endless eyes, and he smiled nervously and looked at his hands. "It's a rare man who is taken for what he truly is," he said. "There is much misjudgment in the world. Now I knew you for a unicorn when I first saw you, and I know that I am your friend. Yet you take me for a clown, or a clod, or a betrayer, and so must I be if you see me so. The magic on you is only magic and will vanish as soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. Still I have read, or heard it sung, that unicorns when time was young, could tell the difference 'twixt the two - the false shining and the true, the lips' laugh and the heart's rue. — Peter S. Beagle
Still the king would have turned away, but Schmendrick touched his arm and leaned near. "It's true, you know," he whispered. "But for him
but for them all
the tale would have worked out quite another way, and who can say that the ending would have been even as happy as this? You must be their king, and you must rule them as kindly as you would a braver and more faithful folk. For they are your fate. — Peter S. Beagle
Tell you something," the raven said. "I was flying over the Midwest once." He stopped abruptly, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, and began again. "I was flying over the Midwest. Iowa or Illinois, or some place like that. And I saw this big damn seagull. Right in the middle of Iowa, a seagull. And he was flying around in big, wide circles, real sweeping circles, the way a seagull flies, flapping his wings just enough to keep on the updrafts. Every time he saw water he'd go flying down toward it, yelling, "I found it! I found it!" The poor sonofabitch was looking for the ocean. And every time he saw water, he thought that was the ocean. He didn't know anything about ponds or lakes or anything. All the water he ever saw was the ocean. He thought that was all the water there was. — Peter S. Beagle
She loved him too. That's why she let him go. — Peter S. Beagle
The moon was gone, but to the magician's eyes the unicorn was the moon, cold and white and very old, lighting his way to safety, or to madness. — Peter S. Beagle
When I was eighteen or twenty, I knew everything except what I wanted. I knew all about people, and poetry, and love, and music, and politics, and baseball, and history, and I played pretty good jazz piano. And then I went traveling, because I felt that I might have missed something and it would be a good idea to learn it before I got my master's degree. (...) And the older I grew, and the farther I traveled, the younger I grew and the less I knew. I could feel it happening to me. I could actually walk down a dirty street and feel all my wisdom slipping away from me, all the things I wrote term papers about. — Peter S. Beagle
O meal is good enough to justify all the money and effort wasted in preparing it. It is an illusion and an expense. Live as I do, undeceived. — Peter S. Beagle
If she had touched me," he said very softly, "I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me but I could not let her. No cat will. We let human beings caress us because it is pleasant enough and calms them - but not her. The price is more than a cat can pay. — Peter S. Beagle
He really would have done all that for her, you see, and done it believing he'd burn in hell forever for doing it. He hadn't done it, and wouldn't had made her his anyway, but you see why he'd have figured it did. Or maybe I saw it anyway, at the time. He was a maniac and a monster, but people don't love like that anymore. Or maybe it's only the maniacs and monsters who do. I don't know. — Peter S. Beagle
This world, that world, doesn't matter. You never make people to see what you see, hear, feel what you feel. Notes don't do it, words don't do it, paints, bronze, marble, nothing. All you can do, you maybe get it a little close, a little closer. But right, like you're talking? No. — Peter S. Beagle
But still I feel I waste a lot of time leaning on my elbow and thinking to myself, alright sucker, now what? — Peter S. Beagle
This creature is the Pooka. Pay no mind to the shape he wears, for he's none of his own, and no soul either. Ware him ever, trust him never, but when the wind's right he has his uses. Never forget that you will never know him. The Pooka's mystery even to the Pooka. — Peter S. Beagle
A Clock is not time; it's numbers and springs. Pay it no mind. — Peter S. Beagle
How can it be?" she wondered. "I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns ( ... ) But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else - what do they look to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children? — Peter S. Beagle
You pile of stones, you waste, you desolation, I'll stuff you with misery till it comes out of your eyes. I'll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep. I'll turn you into a bad poet with dreams. — Peter S. Beagle
There are people,' he said, 'who give, and there are people who take. There are people who create, people who destroy, and people who don't do anything and drive the other two kinds crazy. It's born in you, whether you give or take, and that's the way you are. Ravens bring things to people. We're like that. It's our nature. We don't like it. We'd much rather be eagles, or swans, or even one of those moronic robins, but we're ravens and there you are. Ravens don't feel right without somebody to bring things to, and when we do find somebody we realize what a silly business it was in the first place." He made a sound between a chuckle and a cough. "Ravens are pretty neurotic birds. We're closer to people than any other bird, and we're bound to them all our lives, but we don't have to like them. You think we brought Elijah food because we liked him? He was an old man with a dirty beard. — Peter S. Beagle
Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal. — Peter S. Beagle
So you're an angel, fine, that's terrific. Now give me back my shadows. (Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel) — Peter S. Beagle
Nay, Cully, you have it backward," she called to him. "There's no such a person as you, or me, or any of us. Robin and Marian are real, and we are the legend! — Peter S. Beagle
What is plucked will grow again,
What is slain lives on,
What is stolen will remain
What is gone is gone. — Peter S. Beagle
No sorrow will live in me as long as that joy
save one, and I thank you for that, too. — Peter S. Beagle
The enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. Still — Peter S. Beagle
It's a rare man who is taken for what he truly is. — Peter S. Beagle
I love whom I love. — Peter S. Beagle
It was not her dream that chilled him, but that she did not weep as she told it. As a hero, he understood weeping women and knew how to make them stop crying
generally you killed something
but her calm terror confused and unmanned him, while the shape of her face crumbled the distant dignity he had been so pleased at maintaining. When he spoke again, his voice was young and stumbling. — Peter S. Beagle
In my village, one of our priests says that love between men is a great sin- the other argues that nothing at all is sinful except weak ale, overdone meat, and building a fire in any way but his. — Peter S. Beagle
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. — Peter S. Beagle
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. — Peter S. Beagle
It cannot be an ill fortune to have loved a unicorn, — Peter S. Beagle
They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts. — Peter S. Beagle
Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal. — Peter S. Beagle
When your life is all taking, what need to learn courtship? Carcharos's passion for Jassi Belnarak deepened and darkened with every sleepless night, but it did not keep him from understanding that neither beneficence nor meek wistfulness would win her honestly. Power would have to do, after all; and I think that for the only time in that bad life, Carcharos may truly have regretted the necessity of forcing his will on another person. The moment can't have lasted long, but I think further that it may have been the closest Carcharos ever came to knowing love. — Peter S. Beagle
We are what we are forever, unchanging - you are everything all at once, past and present and future all rioting together. I pity you terribly, I could never bear to be like you, but I wonder and wonder about you. — Peter S. Beagle
The unicorn had all the world in her eyes, all the world I'm never going to see, but it doesn't matter, because now I have seen it, and it's beautiful, and I was in there too. — Peter S. Beagle
The unicorn was gray and still. "There is magic on me," she said. "Why did you not tell me?"
"I thought you knew," the magician answered gently. "After all, didn't you wonder how it could be that they recognized you?" Then he smiled, which made him look a little older. "No, of course not. You never would wonder about that."
"There has never been a spell on me before," the unicorn said. She shivered long and deep. "There has never been a world in which I was not known. — Peter S. Beagle
I believe myself to be good, he thought, and so I can afford to titillate myself by considering evil, like a child frightening himself with horror stories. I am not a bad man. But I am not a wise one, either, nor understanding. And yet, if I lose this rumpled and comfortable skin that I wear, how will I ever find anything to replace it? I wish I were younger and could grow skin easily. — Peter S. Beagle
I am afraid! It is not starving I fear, or talking to people, or even being alone. But I cannot bear to be useless and ineffectual. There must be some meaning to me, if not to my life; there must surely be some purpose that has my name written on it. If this is not so, if I am deceiving myself about this too, then why should I want to become real? What reason have I to live anywhere? — Peter S. Beagle
All around Molly there flowed and flowered a light as impossible as snow set afire, while thousands of cloven hooves sang by like cymbals. She stood very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy was too great for her body to understand. — Peter S. Beagle
It's really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space
that's the way life was meant to be. You're supposed to be too late for some things. Don't worry about it. — Peter S. Beagle
He knew very well that the great majority of human conversation is meaningless. A man can get through most of his days on stock answers to stock questions, he thought. Once he catches onto the game, he can manage with an assortment of grunts. This would not be so if people listened to each other, but they don't. They know that no one is going to say anything moving and important to them at that very moment. Anything important will be announced in the newspapers and reprinted for those who missed it. No one really wants to know how his neighbor is feeling, but he asks him anyway, because it is polite, and because he knows that his neighbor certainly will not tell him how he feels. What this woman and I say to each other is not important. It is the simple making of sounds that pleases us. — Peter S. Beagle
Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger,
And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved. — Peter S. Beagle