Peter S. Beagle - The Last Unicorn (1968)

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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.

Peter S. Beagle
I fear it, for her sake. It would mean that she too is a wanderer now, and that is a fate for human beings, not for unicorns. But I hope, of course I hope.

Peter S. Beagle
Whatever can die is beautiful — more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?

Peter S. Beagle
No cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them.

Peter S. Beagle
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.

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
He was not lying, merely organizing events more sensibly.

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
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
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
I am a king's daughter, And if I cared to care, The moon that has no mistress Would flutter in my hair. No one dares to cherish What I choose to crave. Never have I hungered, For that I did not have I am a kings daughter, And I grow old within The prison of my person, The shackles of my skin. And I would run away And beg from door to door, Just to see your shadow Once, and never more.

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

Peter S. Beagle
I always say perseverance is nine-tenths of any art — not that it's much help to be nine-tenths an artist, of course.

Peter S. Beagle