Top 180 Peter S. Beagle Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.”

— Peter S. Beagle

2. “There are no happy endings, because nothing ends.”

— Peter S. Beagle

3. “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

4. “Take me with you. For laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you.”

— Peter S. Beagle

5. “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

6. “We are our own dragons and our own heroes. We must rescue ourselves from ourselves.”

— Peter S. Beagle

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

— Peter S. Beagle

Featured in: Strong Quotes

8. “Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard’s castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts...”

— Peter S. Beagle

9. “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.”

— Peter S. Beagle

10. “As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn’t say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.”

— Peter S. Beagle

11. “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.”

— Peter S. Beagle

12. “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.”

— Peter S. Beagle

13. “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.”

— Peter S. Beagle

14. “What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain – What is gone is gone.”

— Peter S. Beagle

15. “The last unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.”

— Peter S. Beagle

16. “Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.”

— Peter S. Beagle

17. “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

18. “Don’t look back and don’t run. You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.”

— Peter S. Beagle

19. “The unicorn was weary of human beings. Watching her companions as they slept, seeing the shadows of their dreams scurry over their faces, she would feel herself bending under the heaviness of knowing their names. Then she would run until morning to ease the ache: swifter than rain, swift as loss, racing to catch up with the time when she had known nothing at all but the sweetness of being herself.”

— Peter S. Beagle

20. “How’s the Angel of Death supposed to do his job with clipped wings?”

— Peter S. Beagle

21. “Ravens bring things to people. We’re like that. It’s our nature. We don’t like it.”

— Peter S. Beagle

22. “The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.”

— Peter S. Beagle

23. “It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is.”

— Peter S. Beagle

24. “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

25. “I am infected with life and will die of it in time.”

— Peter S. Beagle

26. “Unicorns are immortal. It is their nature to live alone in one place: usually a forest where there is a pool clear enough for them to see themselves – for they are a little vain, knowing themselves to be the most beautiful.”

— Peter S. Beagle

27. “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

28. “Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.”

— Peter S. Beagle

29. “We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.”

— Peter S. Beagle

30. “This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?”

— Peter S. Beagle

31. “I think love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last.”

— Peter S. Beagle

32. “I was born mortal, and I have been immortal for a long, foolish time, and one day I will be mortal again; so I know something that a unicorn cannot know. Whatever can die is beautiful – more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world.”

— Peter S. Beagle

33. “We don’t steal from the rich and give to the poor. We steal from the poor because they can’t fight back – most of them – and the rich take from us because they could wipe us out in a day.”

— Peter S. Beagle

34. “The universe lies to our senses and they lie to us, and how can we ourselves be anything but liars? For myself, I trust neither message nor messenger; neither what I am told, nor what I see. There may be truth somewhere, but it never gets down to me.”

— Peter S. Beagle

35. “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

36. “Under the moon, the road that ran from the edge of her forest gleamed like water, but when she stepped out onto it, away from the trees, she felt how hard it was, and how long. She almost turned back then; but instead she took a deep breath of the woods air that still drifted to her, and held it in her mouth like a flower, as long as she could.”

— Peter S. Beagle

37. “Always, always,” it sighed, “faithfulness 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

38. “She is a rarer creature than you dare to dream. She is a myth, a memory, a will-o’-the-wish.”

— Peter S. Beagle

39. “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.”

— Peter S. Beagle

Featured in: Reading Quotes

40. “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

41. “But I’m always dreaming, even when I’m awake; it is never finished.”

— Peter S. Beagle

42. “There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous.”

— Peter S. Beagle

43. “This creature is the Pooka. Pay no mind to the shape he wears, for he’s none of his own, and no soul either. Ware him ever, trust him never, but when the wind’s right he has his uses. Never forget that you will never know him. The Pooka’s mystery even to the Pooka.”

— Peter S. Beagle

44. “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

45. “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.” Before.”

— Peter S. Beagle

46. “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

47. “But another sound followed them long after these had faded, followed them into morning on a strange road – the tiny, dry sound of a spider weeping.”

— Peter S. Beagle

48. “Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.” A.”

— Peter S. Beagle

49. “He thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.”

— Peter S. Beagle

50. “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