Peter S. Beagle Quotes

76 Sourced Quotes

Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger, And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.

Peter S. Beagle
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.

Peter S. Beagle
Envy nobody. It is the true secret of happiness, or at least the only one I know.

Peter S. Beagle
But the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes.

Peter S. Beagle
The woman I loved died because I did not love her enough — what greater sin is there than that?

Peter S. Beagle
Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.

Peter S. Beagle
It's a rare man who is taken for what he truly is.... There is much misjudgment in the world.... We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.

Peter S. Beagle
But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me — me, Jenny Gluckstein — like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is one thing — recognition is something else.

Peter S. Beagle
You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

Peter S. Beagle
Sparrows and cats will live in my shoe, Sooner than I will live with you. Fish will come walking out of the sea, Sooner than you will come back to me.

Peter S. Beagle
Sitting up all night would be pointless if somebody you loved wasn't sitting up with you, picking out music to play and helping you kill the bourbon. Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.

Peter S. Beagle
I'll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, 'The soul selects her own society.' I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, 'Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.

Peter S. Beagle
The tune was wailing and mournful, almost flagrantly so, and the total effect was of a heartbroken piccolo being parted forever from its bagpipe lover.

Peter S. Beagle
He was not lying, merely organizing events more sensibly.

Peter S. Beagle
The moon was gone, but to the magician's eyes the unicorn was the moon, cold and white and very old, lighting his way to safety, or to madness.

Peter S. Beagle
Schmendrick stepped out into the open and said a few words. They were short words, undistinguished either by melody or harshness, and Schmendrick himself could not hear them for the Red Bull's dreadful bawling. But he knew what they meant, and he knew exactly how to say them, and he knew that he could say them again when he wanted to, in the same way or in a different way. Now he spoke them gently and with joy, and as did so he felt his immortality fall from him like an armour, or like a shroud.

Peter S. Beagle