Peter S. Beagle Quotes

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

The unicorn had all the world in her eyes, all the world I'm never going to see, but it doesn't matter, because now I have seen it, and it's beautiful, and I was in there too.

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.

"Sing to me," she said. "That would be valiant, to raise your voice in this dark, lonely place, and it will be useful as well. Sing to me, sing loudly-drown out my dreams, keep me from remembering whatever wants me to remember it. Sing to me, my lord prince, if it please you. It may not seem a hero's task, but I would be glad of it."

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.

"What happened instead was that the tree fell in love with him and began to murmur fondly of the joy to be found in the eternal embrace of a red oak. "Always, always," it sighed, "faithful beyond any man's deserving. I will keep the color of your eyes when no other in the world remembers your name. There is no immortality but a tree's love.

There are no happy endings because nothing ends.

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.

It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is.

So you're an angel, fine, that's terrific. Now give me back my shadows. (Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel)

It’s like marriage. The race there is between total knowledge of each other and death. If death comes first, it’s considered a successful marriage.

"He is a true hero," she said, "a dragonslayer, a giantkiller, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he's a good man as well. They aren't always."

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

I love whom I love.

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.