Peter S. Beagle Quotes

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.

Claudio Bianchi did write poetry [...] He had no vanity about this, no fantasies of literary celebrity; he simply took pleasure putting words in order, exactly as he laid out seedlings in the spring, and tasting them afterward, as he tasted fresh new scallions or ripe tomatoes, or smelled mint or garlic on his hands.

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.

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

But the important thing is for you to understand that it doesn't matter whether the clock strikes ten next, or fifteen o'clock. You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you can understand that — then any time at all will be the right time for you.

He sighed, telling himself that the inevitable is a great blessing to a man weary of making choices.

The unicorn was weary of human beings. Watching her companions as they slept, seeing the shadows of their dreams scurry over their faces, she would feel herself bending under the heaviness of knowing their names. Then she would run until morning to ease the ache: swifter than rain, swift as loss, racing to catch up with the time when she had known nothing at all but the sweetness of being herself.

"But I must go on," said the Lady Amalthea, "for it is never finished. Even when I wake, I cannot tell what is real, and what I am dreaming as I move and speak and eat my dinner. I remember what cannot have happened, and forget something that is happening to me know. People look at me as though I should know them, and I do know them in the dream, and always the fire draws me nearer, though I am awake — "

Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal.

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.

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.

You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.

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.

"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.

It was an old trick, one he remembered from every discussion and bull session he had ever taken part in: if you don’t know, make it up. Nobody ever admitted he didn’t know a quotation, or a book, or an essay on something. The rule also had a corollary: if you’re not sure, it’s Marlowe.