Peter S. Beagle
Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed.
The horns came riding in like the rainbow masts of silver ships.
Take me with you. For laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you.Collection: Laughing
Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Fall
You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.Collection: Real
The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch's door when she is already away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. 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.Collection: Uncles
Wisdom is finding joy in bewildermentCollection: Joy
We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.Collection: Dream
Only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power.Collection: Life
A Clock is not time; it's numbers and springs. Pay it no mind.Collection: Spring
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Cat
Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.Collection: Life
Heroes know that things must happen when it is time for them to happen. A quest may not simply be abandoned; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever; a happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.Collection: Hero
I am infected with life and will die of it in time.Collection: Dies
There are no happy endings, because nothing ends.Collection: Unicorn
song of elli (old age) "What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain What is gone is gone... What is sea-born dies on land, Soft is trod upon. What is given burns the hand - What is gone is gone... Here is there, and high is low; All may be undone. What is true, no two men know - What is gone is gone... Who has choices need not choose. We must, who have none. We can love but what we lose - What is gone is gone.Collection: Song
Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Space
There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous.Collection: Honesty
What do men know? Because they have seen no unicorns for a while does not mean we have all vanished.Collection: Mean
I am no king, and I am no lord, And I am no soldier at-arms," said he. "I'm none but a harper, and a very poor harper, That am come hither to wed with ye." "If you were a lord, you should be my lord, And the same if you were a thief," said she. "And if you are a harper, you shall be my harper, For it makes no matter to me, to me, For it makes no matter to me." "But what if it prove that I am no harper? That I lied for your love most monstrously?" "Why, then I'll teach you to play and sing, For I dearly love a good harp," said she.Collection: Kings
Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of anything. Whatever you have been, you are mine now. I can hold you.Collection: Fear
You pile of stones, you waste, you desolation, I'll stuff you with misery till it comes out of your eyes. I'll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep. I'll turn you into a bad poet with dreams.Collection: Dream
I am afraid! It is not starving I fear, or talking to people, or even being alone. But I cannot bear to be useless and ineffectual. There must be some meaning to me, if not to my life; there must surely be some purpose that has my name written on it. If this is not so, if I am deceiving myself about this too, then why should I want to become real? What reason have I to live anywhere?Collection: Real
The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.Collection: Rocks
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.Collection: Cat
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?Collection: Years
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Night
Unicorn. Old French, unicorne. Latin, unicornis. Literally, one-horned: unus, one and cornu,a horn. A fabulous animal resembling a horse with one horn.Collection: Horse
there never is a happy ending because nothing ever ends.Collection: Happy Endings
What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain-- What is gone is gone.Collection: Gone
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.Collection: Daughter
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Patience
We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Hero
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.Collection: Love Is
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.Collection: Grief
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)Collection: Uncles
Envy nobody. It is the true secret of happiness, or at least the only one I know. (By Moonlight)Collection: Envy
- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.Collection: Love And Fear
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Father
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?Collection: Beautiful
The most professional curse ever snarled or croaked or thundered can have no effect on a pure heart.Collection: Heart
I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.Collection: Regret
No," he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king's voice... whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give.Collection: Kings