Peter S. Beagle Quotes

Man searches constantly for identity, he thought as he trotted along the gravel path. He has no real proof of this existence except for the reaction of other people to that fact. So he listens very closely to what people say to one another about him, whether it's good or bad, because it indicates that he lives in the same world they do, and that all his fears about being invisible, impotent, lacking some mysterious dimension that other people have, are groundless.

~ 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

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

When I was a young man and very well thought of,I couldn't ask aught that the ladies denied.I nibbled their hearts like a handful of raisins,And I never spoke love but I knew that I lied. But I said to myself, 'Ah, they none of them know The secret I shelter and savor and save I wait for the one who will see through my seeming, And I'll know when I love by the way I behave.'The years drifted over like clouds in the heavens;The ladies went by me like snow on the wind.I charmed and I cheated, deceived and dissembled,And I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned. But I said to myself, 'Ah, they none of them see There's part of me pure as the whisk of a wave. My lady is late but she'll find I've been faithful, And I'll know when I love by the way I behave.'At last came a lady both knowing and tender,Saying, 'you're not at all what they take you to be.'I betrayed her before she had quite finished speaking,And she swallowed cold poison and jumped in the sea. And I say to myself when there's time for a word, As I gracefully grow more debauched and depraved, 'Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.

~ Peter S. Beagle

I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You don't understand. Never mind.

~ Peter S. Beagle

Because that world's gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can't make that other one real again. It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..no 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

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

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.

~ Peter S. Beagle

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.

~ Peter S. Beagle

So let's say you marry this girl. All right, you can still be a great man. Look at all the great men who had wives. Go ahead, be a great man, don't let me stop you. Only first you should stop by the grocer and pick up something for the dog. Also for the baby, soft, because he's getting his teeth. To do this, you have to have a job five days a week, you can be a great man on week ends.

~ Peter S. Beagle

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

Farrell had seen pure white drunkenness before, but not often enough to recognize it at sight. He knew the thing itself, however--the freight train rattling and lurching comically from hilarity to slobbering sorrow, picking up speed as it passed through wild, aimless anger straight on into wild sickness; and then, running smoothly and almost silently now, into a dark place of shaking and sweating and crying, and out again with no warning to where a dazzling snowy light made everything very still.

~ Peter S. Beagle

...and it's not my place to chase around after you, fixing stuff. What I know's what I know, and it don't include putting the world back the way it out to be. It's too late for that. Way too late for heroes, champions, miracles. Don't matter what our heritage was maybe meant for - your side got hold of it first, and you won long ago. No undoing that, Esau, I ain't fool enough to think otherwise. I'm still sorry for you, but I know your side's won, this side of the grave.

~ 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 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

I like being brave well enough, but I will be a lazy coward again if you think that would be better.

~ Peter S. Beagle

I am a good runner. There are many faster, but not so many for whom it has been as necessary to learn to become nothing but flight.

~ Peter S. Beagle

Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.

~ Peter S. Beagle

Unicorns know naught of shame, or need, or doubt, or debt;But mortals, as you may have noticed, take what they can get.

~ Peter S. Beagle

I wish something would happen to me, something that would show me exactly how cruel and jealous and vengeful I can be. Then I could go back to gentleness because I chose it over brutality for its own sake, not because I didn't have the courage to be cruel. I might even like cruelty. I doubt very much that I would, but I ought to find out.

~ 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

I would have chosen any other than this for my prison. 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