Peter S. Beagle Quotes

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.

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?

Marveling at his own boldness, he said softly, "I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.

The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.

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

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.

Envy nobody. It is the true secret of happiness, or at least the only one I know. (By Moonlight)

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?

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.

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.

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.

I'll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, 'The soul selects her own society.' I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, 'Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.

The last unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.

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.

You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention. [...] Never run. [...] Walk slowly, and pretend to be thinking of something else. Sing a song, say a poem, do your tricks, but walk slowly and she may not follow.

There is an old saying that there is no country as unhappy as one that need heroes."
(King Pelles the Sure)

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.

Only the spider paid no mind when the unicorn called softly to her through the open door. Arachne was busy with a web which looked to her as though the Milky Way had begun to fall like snow. The unicorn whispered, 'Weaver, freedom is better, freedom is better,' but the spider fled unhearing up and down her iron loom.

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.

She came very close, and looking into my eyes, she said, “My Jenny,” and then she bent her head and kissed me - here, on the left-hand corner of my mouth. And nobody knows better than I that I couldn’t have felt anything, because Tamsin was a ghost - but nobody but me knows what I felt. And I’ll always know.