Peter S. Beagle Quotes

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.

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.

What can I tell you, Laura? That I confused justice and revenge? People do that a great deal, and they always have.

"I didn't know unicorns had names," I said. "I didn't know they ever loved people."
"They don't. Only this one." He turned and walked away swiftly, saying over his shoulder, "Her name was Amalthea."

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.

I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.

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.

The long road hurried to nowhere and had no end.

My father hates cats. He says that 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.

The Unicorn Sonata … tells us that our true home is often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes — and our ears — to find it.

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

She's a lady," I says, "for all she's a Portygee, and you're no more a gentleman than that monkey in your mango tree. Money don't make such as us into gentlemen, Henry Lee. All it does, it makes us rich monkeys. You know that, same as me.

"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.

As for you and your heart and the things you said and the didn't say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.

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.