Peter S. Beagle Quotes

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.

~ Peter S. Beagle

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

~ Peter S. Beagle

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

When I was alive, I believed — as you do — that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls. (...) You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that — then any time at all will be the right time for you.

~ Peter S. Beagle

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

~ Peter S. Beagle

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

I will miss it so,” she said beside him. “This hell of a place, I will miss it so much. This fat body, walking mud puddle, deceived by everything, this impossible, ruinous accident of a world, these people who would truly rather hurt one another than eat—oh, there is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do to stay here ten minutes longer. Oh, I will leave claw marks, I will drag mountains and forests away under my fingernails when I am dragged off. Such a stupid way to feel. I will be all dirty from clutching at this stupid planet, and the gods will laugh at me.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

~ Peter S. Beagle

I think that 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.... 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.

~ Peter S. Beagle

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. Unfortunately, it seems to be working backward at the moment, and even I can find no way to set it right. It must be that you are meant to find your own way to reach your power in time; but frankly, you should live so long as that will take you. Therefore I grant it that you shall not age from this day forth, but will travel the world round and round, eternally inefficient, until at last you come to yourself and know what you are. Don't thank me. I tremble at your doom.

~ Peter S. Beagle

It's not you worries me. The king is a good man, and an old friend, but it has been a long time, and kings change. Even more than other people, kings change.

~ Peter S. Beagle

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

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

~ Peter S. Beagle

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.

~ 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 writing of fantasy is best left to those who have nothing better to do, as is indicated by the fairy tales of otherwise gifted writers like Robert Graves and John Ciardi. It isn't so much the difficulty of doing it right, without falling off the tightrope into the cold pits of allegory or mindless whimsy‌—‌the weary thing is that even if you bring it off, all you've done is write a fantasy, and so what? Life is dangerous, and escapism has become a dirty word. I feel the same way, being a child of my own critical times. I'd write the other stuff, the real books, if I could. Plenty nitty-gritty. If I could.

~ 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

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

You think this is living? This is eating, nothing else.

~ Peter S. Beagle

There are no happy endings, he knew, because nothing ends; and if there were any being dispensed, a great many worthier people would be in line for them long before Michael and Laura and himself. But the happiness of the unworthy and the happiness of the so-so is as fragile and self-centered and dear as the happiness of the righteous and the worthy; and the happiness of the living is no less short and desperate and forgotten than the joys of the dead.

~ Peter S. Beagle

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.

~ Peter S. Beagle

I love you, more, I think, than I know, but our kind of love isn't a sword. It's a light. Not a fire. A small light, just bright enough to read love letters by and keep the animals at a growling distance. In time it will go out. All lights go out. So do all fires, if it's any comfort. Love me, and look at me, and remember me, as I'll remember you.

~ Peter S. Beagle

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.

~ Peter S. Beagle

I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they saw them. But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else-what do they look like to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?

~ Peter S. Beagle

You must remind me, little one. When I... when I lose myself - when I lose her - you must remind me that I am still searching, still waiting... that I have never forgotten her, never turned from all she taught me. I sit in this place... I sit... because a king has to sit, you see... but in my mind, in my poor mind, I am always away with her....

~ Peter S. Beagle

And at last she woke up in the middle of one warm night and said, Yes, but now.

~ Peter S. Beagle

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

Unicorns are immortal. It is their nature to live alone in one place: usually a forest where there is a pool clear enough for them to see themselves-for they are a little vain, knowing themselves to be the most beautiful creatures in all the world, and magic besides. They mate very rarely, and no place is more enchanted than one where a unicorn has been born. The last time she had seen another unicorn the young virgins who still came seeking her now and then had called to her in a different tongue; but then, she had no idea of months and years and centuries, or even of seasons. It was always spring in her forest, because she lived there, and she wandered all day among the great beech trees, keeping watch over the animals that lived in the ground and under bushes, in nests and caves, earths and treetops. Generation after generation, wolves and rabbits alike, they hunted and loved and had children and died, and as the unicorn did none of these things, she never grew tired of watching them.

~ Peter S. Beagle

I’m a magician with no magic, and that’s no one at all.

~ Peter S. Beagle

Ravens bring things to people. We're like that. It's our nature. We don't like it.

~ Peter S. Beagle

Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.

~ Peter S. Beagle

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

I will kill you if you set me free,' the eyes said. 'Set me free.

~ Peter S. Beagle

Under the moon, the road that ran from the edge of her forest gleamed like water, but when she stepped out onto it, away from the trees, she felt how hard it was, and how long. She almost turned back then; but instead she took a deep breath of the woods air that still drifted to her, and held it in her mouth like a flower, as long as she could.

~ Peter S. Beagle

There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous.

~ Peter S. Beagle