Top 100 Peter S Beagle Quotes
#1. 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
#2. But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me - me, Jenny Gluckstein - like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is one thing - recognition is something else.
Peter S. Beagle
#3. 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
#4. 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!
Peter S. Beagle
#5. Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard's castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts ...
Peter S. Beagle
#6. You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.
Peter S. Beagle
#7. 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)
Peter S. Beagle
#8. We are used men, spent men - but if you would see miracles, you have only to request the impossible of us. We will become young again if you wish it so.
Peter S. Beagle
#9. Avicenna California ... Museum of my twisted youth, vault of my dearest and most disgusting memories.
Peter S. Beagle
#10. 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.
Peter S. Beagle
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Oh, more people than not have some magic, they just forget about it. Children use it all the time - what do you think jump rope rhymes are, or bouncing ball games, or cat's cradles? Where do you think that girl, Aiffe, draws her power? Because she refuses to forget, that's all it is.
Peter S. Beagle
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#18. 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
#19. A dream that returns so often is like to be a messenger, come to warn you of the future or to remind you of things untimely forgotten.
Peter S. Beagle
#20. 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
#21. When we go to the fair in disguise, we never win at archery or at singlestick. We do get some nice compliments on our disguises, but no more than that.
Peter S. Beagle
#22. 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.
Peter S. Beagle
#23. Sitting up all night would be pointless if somebody you loved wasn't sitting up with you, picking out music to play and helping you kill the bourbon. Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.
Peter S. Beagle
#24. It would be a crime to eat such a mouse!" he proclaimed everywhere. "An absolute, shameful, yummy crime.
Peter S. Beagle
#25. - and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.
Peter S. Beagle
#26. You're in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no.
Peter S. Beagle
#27. 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
#28. Ah. My story. Are you certain you wish to hear it? It is long, unlikely, and remarkably unedifying
shameful, even, to come from a minister's lips. Blasphemous, too, properly regarded.
Peter S. Beagle
#30. My son, your ineptitude is so vast, your incompetence so profound, that I am certain you are inhabited by greater power than I have ever known.
Peter S. Beagle
#32. 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
#33. Death takes what man would keep," said the butterfly, "and leaves what man would lose. Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. I warm my hands before the fire of life and get four-way relief.
Peter S. Beagle
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. I think love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last.
Peter S. Beagle
#37. The whistling of a ghost is like no other sound in a fistful of universes, because it is woven of all the whistles the ghost has ever heard, and so it usually includes train moans, lunch whistles, fire alarms, and the affronted-virgin screaming of tea kettles.
Peter S. Beagle
#38. I fear it, for her sake. It would mean that she too is a wanderer now, and that is a fate for human beings, not for unicorns. But I hope, of course I hope.
Peter S. Beagle
#39. 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
#40. But the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes.
Peter S. Beagle
#41. She was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night.
Peter S. Beagle
#42. 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
#43. It's like marriage. The race there is between total knowledge of each other and death. If death comes first, it's considered a successful marriage.
Peter S. Beagle
#44. 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
#45. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.
Peter S. Beagle
#47. Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.
Peter S. Beagle
#48. Don't look back and don't run. You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.
Peter S. Beagle
#49. The torches went out, and in the darkness, he placed his lips to my ear. I believe you because I choose to; not because I do.
Peter S. Beagle
#50. Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.
Peter S. Beagle
#51. Schmendrick said, "She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world."
"She would be." Molly sniffed. "It would be the last unicorn in the world that came to Molly Grue.
Peter S. Beagle
#52. She did not look anything like a horned horse, as unicorns are often pictured, being smaller and cloven-hoofed, and possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in dancing mockery.
Peter S. Beagle
#54. Envy nobody. It is the true secret of happiness, or at least the only one I know. (By Moonlight)
Peter S. Beagle
#55. No sorrow will live in me as long as that joy
save one, and I thank you for that, too.
Peter S. Beagle
#56. How's the Angel of Death supposed to do his job with clipped wings?
Peter S. Beagle
#57. There is only one spot in me that is as warm and placid as those cattle, and that is the part that knows quite surely that I will always be cold, that there will always be a wind hunting through me, and that I will always be hurrying before the coming darkness in search of a place that is not there.
Peter S. Beagle
#58. Take me with you. For laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you.
Peter S. Beagle
#59. 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
#60. We are our own dragons and our own heroes. We must rescue ourselves from ourselves.
Peter S. Beagle
#61. 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
#63. Farewell,' she said. 'I hope you hear many more songs' - which was the best way she could think of to say good-bye to a butterfly.
Peter S. Beagle
#64. 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
#65. When I was very young every grownup was a hero. It's been all downhill since then, and I have only two left.
Peter S. Beagle
#66. What do men know? Because they have seen no unicorns for a while does not mean we have all vanished.
Peter S. Beagle
#67. The magician was studying her face with his green eyes. "Your face is wet," he said worriedly. "I hope that's spray. If you've become human enough to cry, then no magic in the world - oh, it must be spray. Come with me. It had better be spray.
Peter S. Beagle
#68. 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
#69. No place is more enchanted than where a unicorn has been born.
Peter S. Beagle
#70. The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.
Peter S. Beagle
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. A Clock is not time; it's numbers and springs. Pay it no mind.
Peter S. Beagle
#75. They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.
Peter S. Beagle
#76. You think this is living? This is eating, nothing else.
Peter S. Beagle
#77. Any woman can weep without tears," she answered over her shoulder, "and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that's riddle enough
Peter S. Beagle
#78. He had never missed God or the hope of heaven, but he had dearly wanted confession to rest his mind, Communion to let him touch something beyond Father Krone's dry, shaky hand, and holy water to taste like starlight.
Peter S. Beagle
#79. There is no such thing as a cat - it is just a shape that all manner of imps, hobs, and devilkins like to put on, to gain easy entrance into the homes of men.
Peter S. Beagle
#80. She was one woman who knew what to do with a slight moral edge. The
Peter S. Beagle
#81. 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
#82. The stars were going out now, one by one, dropping like pennies behind the television aerials and the skylights and the washing strung between the chimneys. The sky was still dark - a sated, navy-blue woman - but the grass was jittery with the expectation of dawn.
Peter S. Beagle
#83. If he had even blinked, she would have been gone; but he did not blink, and he held her, as he had learned to hold griffins and chimeras motionless with his steady gaze. Her bare feet wounded him deeper than any tusk or riving talon ever had, but he was a true hero.
Peter S. Beagle
#85. 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
#86. 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.
Peter S. Beagle
#87. There is an old saying that there is no country as unhappy as one that need heroes.
(King Pelles the Sure)
Peter S. Beagle
#88. and even the feral, near-wild Third Cat, whose true name he had never discovered, as one has to do with cats, trailed
Peter S. Beagle
#89. I was one of the haves, and one of the secrets of being a have is not wasting your time on empathy.
Peter S. Beagle
#91. I like being brave well enough, but I will be a lazy coward again if you think that would be better.
Peter S. Beagle
#92. I will kill you if you set me free,' the eyes said. 'Set me free.
Peter S. Beagle
#93. If there is one thing in this world that I was raised and trained to know, it is that there is only so much you may ask of the gods. Victory in battle is their lightest gift; a quiet heart is your own concern.
Peter S. Beagle
#94. Her face was a stranger's face, which was as it should be. Love each other from the day we are born to the day we die, we are still strangers every minute, and nobody should forget that, even though we have to.
Peter S. Beagle
#95. 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
#96. The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door.
Peter S. Beagle
#97. 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
#98. All right, all right for you, you pretentious kneecap! How would you like a punch in the eye?
Peter S. Beagle
#100. She is a story with no ending, happy or sad. She can never belong to anything mortal enough to want her. Most
Peter S. Beagle
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
