Peter S. Beagle Quotes

76 Sourced Quotes

No meal is good enough to justify all the money and effort wasted in preparing it. It is an illusion and an expense. Live as I do, undeceived.

Peter S. Beagle
There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous.

Peter S. Beagle
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.

Peter S. Beagle
Don't look back, and don't run. You must never run from anything immortal; it attracts their attention.

Peter S. Beagle
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.

Peter S. Beagle
My son, your ineptitude is so vast, your incompetence so profound, that I am certain you are inhabited by greater power than I have ever known.

Peter S. Beagle
When I was very young every grownup was a hero. It's been all downhill since then, and I have only two left.

Peter S. Beagle
Farewell,' she said. 'I hope you hear many more songs' - which was the best way she could think of to say good-bye to a butterfly.

Peter S. Beagle
Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of anything. Whatever you have been, you are mine now. I can hold you.

Peter S. Beagle
Who has choices need not choose. We must, who have none. We can love but what we lose— What is gone is gone.

Peter S. Beagle
The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. … Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.

Peter S. Beagle
He had never missed God or the hope of heaven, but he had dearly wanted confession to rest his mind, Communion to let him touch something beyond Father Krone's dry, shaky hand, and holy water to taste like starlight.

Peter S. Beagle
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.

Peter S. Beagle
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.

Peter S. Beagle
Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.

Peter S. Beagle
I love whom I love," Prince Lir repeated firmly. "You have no power over anything that matters.

Peter S. Beagle
And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where where you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?

Peter S. Beagle
Ravens bring things to people. We're like that. It's our nature. We don't like it.

Peter S. Beagle
The unicorn halted in her slow, desperate round of the cage, realizing for the first time that the magician understood her speech. He smiled, and she saw that his face was frighteningly young for a grown man-untraveled by time, unvisited by grief or wisdom. "I know you," he said.

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

Peter S. Beagle
For a moment she turned in a circle, staring at her hands, which she held high and useless, close to her breast. She bobbed and shambled like an ape doing a trick, and her face was the silly, bewildered face of a joker's victim. And yet she could make no move that was not beautiful. Her trapped terror was more lovely than any joy that Molly had ever seen, and that was the most terrible thing about it.

Peter S. Beagle
It's really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space—that's the way life was meant to be. You're supposed to be too late for some things. Don't worry about it.

Peter S. Beagle
Because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far.

Peter S. Beagle
A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.

Peter S. Beagle
I am what I am. I would tell you what you want to know if I could, for you have been kind to me. But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.

Peter S. Beagle