Peter S. Beagle Quotes

He gave them no titles; he never saw the point of doing so. If a poem did not tell you immediately what it was about, then, to Claudio Bianchi, it needed more help than a label was likely to provide.

What is plucked will grow again,
What is slain lives on,
What is stolen will remain — What is gone is gone.

We give them different names, those nights lit only by fire and the moon, depending on the country and the calendar, but we know what they are. They call up the world that was before the Lord came down among us; the world where good and evil were not so certain, so fixed as they are today, where the known and the unheard-of could mingle as they chose...where truth had its doubts, do you see?
(By Moonlight)

"Schmendrick smiled then. "I'm no man," he said. "I'm a magician with no magic, and that's no one at all.

"Still the king would have turned away, but Schmendrick touched his arm and leaned near. "It's true, you know," he whispered. "But for him — but for them all — the tale would have worked out quite another way, and who can say that the ending would have been even as happy as this? You must be their king, and you must rule them as kindly as you would a braver and more faithful folk. For they are your fate.

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.

“The dead,” he had said once, “need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead.” At twenty-two, it had sounded precocious; at thirty-four, it sounded mature, and this pleased Michael very much. He had liked being mature and reasonable. He disliked ritual and pomposity, routine and false emotion, rhetoric and sweeping gestures. Crowds made him nervous. Pageantry offended him. Essentially a romantic, he had put away the trappings of romance, although he had loved them deeply and never known.

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.

...Но аз съм котка, а никоя котка никъде и никога не е дала на никого ясен отговор.

I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.

Don't look back and don't run. You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.

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.

Her face was a stranger’s face, which was as it should be. Love each other from the day we are born to the day we die, we are still strangers every minute, and nobody should forget that, even though we have to.

"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)

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.