Peter S. Beagle Quotes

"All lives are composed of two basic elements," the squirrel said, "purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rain — this is nothing beside a life without poetry."

My people are in the world again. No sorrow will live in my heart as long as that joy — save one, and I thank you for that, too.

I know how to live here, I know how everything smells, and tastes, and is. What could I ever search for in the world, except this again?

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.

The magic on you is only magic and will vanish a soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.

But she knew beyond both hope and vanity that men had changed, and the world with them, because the unicorns were gone.

The torches went out, and in the darkness, he placed his lips to my ear. “I believe you because I choose to; not because I do.

It was not her dream that chilled him, but that she did not weep as she told it. As a hero, he understood weeping women and knew how to make them stop crying — generally you killed something — but her calm terror confused and unmanned him, while the shape of her face crumbled the distant dignity he had been so pleased at maintaining. When he spoke again, his voice was young and stumbling.

Love is not an excuse for bad taste.

"Death takes what man would keep," said the butterfly, "and leaves what man would lose. Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. I warm my hands before the fire of life and get four-way relief."

"If she had touched me," he said very softly, "I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me but I could not let her. No cat will. We let human beings caress us because it is pleasant enough and calms them - but not her. The price is more than a cat can pay."

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.

Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard's castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts...

"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)

"Marveling at his own boldness, he said softly, "I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.