Top 180 Peter S. Beagle Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The most professional curse ever snarled or croaked or thundered can have no effect on a pure heart.”

— Peter S. Beagle

52. “Wisdom is finding joy in bewilderment.”

— Peter S. Beagle

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Marriage isn’t like football, like bocce. One isn’t good at it, nobody has a special gift. You stumble along, and if there is enough love – ” she smiled at him – “you learn.”

— Peter S. Beagle

56. “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

57. “There is nothing like you anywhere among all the stones in the sky, do you realize that? You are the wonder of the cosmos, possibly for embarrassing reasons, but anyway a wonder.”

— Peter S. Beagle

58. “Where you are going now,′ Schmendrick answered, ‘few will mean you anything but evil, and a friendly heart – however foolish – may be as welcome as water one day. Take me with you, for laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you.”

— Peter S. Beagle

59. “My father hates cats. He says that there is no such thing as a cat – it is just a shape that all manner of imps, hobs and devilkins like to put on, to gain easy entrance into the homes of men.”

— Peter S. Beagle

60. “All lives are composed of two basic elements,” the squirrel said, “purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rain – this is nothing beside a life without poetry.”

— Peter S. Beagle

61. “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

62. “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.”

— Peter S. Beagle

63. “She has a newness,” he said. “Everything is for the first time. See how she moves, how she walks, how she turns her head – all for the first time, the first time anyone has ever done these things. See how she draws her breath and lets it go again, as though no one else in the world knew that air was good. It is all for her. If I learned that she had been born this very morning, I would only be surprised that she was so old.”

— Peter S. Beagle

64. “But the important thing is for you to understand that it doesn’t matter whether the clock strikes ten next, or fifteen o’clock. You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you can understand that – then any time at all will be the right time for you.”

— Peter S. Beagle

65. “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

66. “I am a king’s daughter, And if I cared to care, The moon that has no mistress Would flutter in my hair.”

— Peter S. Beagle

67. “A Clock is not time; it’s numbers and springs. Pay it no mind.”

— Peter S. Beagle

68. “Never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.”

— Peter S. Beagle

69. “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

70. “The horns came riding in like the rainbow masts of silver ships.”

— Peter S. Beagle

71. “What do men know? Because they have seen no unicorns for a while does not mean we have all vanished.”

— Peter S. Beagle

72. “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

73. “What use is magic if it can’t save a unicorn?”

— Peter S. Beagle

74. “You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.”

— Peter S. Beagle

75. “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

76. “Her neck was long and slender, making her head seem smaller than it was, and the mane that fell almost to the middle of her back was as soft as dandelion fluff and as fine as cirrus. She had pointed ears and thin legs, with feathers of white hair at the ankles; and the long horn above her eyes shone and shivered with its own seashell light even in the deepest midnight.”

— Peter S. Beagle

77. “I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.”

— Peter S. Beagle

78. “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

79. “That is exactly what heroes are for. Wizards make no difference, so they say that nothing does, but heroes are meant to die for unicorns.”

— Peter S. Beagle

80. “But I still feel I waste a lot of time leaning on my elbow and thinking to myself, ‘alright sucker, now what?’”

— Peter S. Beagle

81. “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

82. “I’ve had worse, and I’ll have better one day. This is not the end.”

— Peter S. Beagle

83. “You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact. Let it end here then, let the quest end. Is the world any the worse for losing the unicorns, and would it be any better if they were running free again? One good woman more in the world is worth every single unicorn gone. Let it end. Marry the prince and live happily ever after.” The.”

— Peter S. Beagle

84. “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

85. “Any woman can weep without tears,” she answered over her shoulder, “and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that’s riddle enough.”

— Peter S. Beagle

86. “You think this is living? This is eating, nothing else.”

— Peter S. Beagle

87. “Traditionally, people are always supposed to feel empty, devastated, when a god leaves them. Nobody seems to wonder how the god might feel. Leaving the only people who almost understood.”

— Peter S. Beagle

88. “Outside, the night lay coiled in the street, cobra-cold and scaled with stars.”

— Peter S. Beagle

89. “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

90. “I believe myself to be good, he thought, and so I can afford to titillate myself by considering evil, like a child frightening himself with horror stories. I am not a bad man. But I am not a wise one, either, nor understanding. And yet, if I lose this rumpled and comfortable skin that I wear, how will I ever find anything to replace it? I wish I were younger and could grow skin easily.”

— Peter S. Beagle

91. “During the meal Schmendrick told stories of his life as an errant enchanter, filling it with kings and dragons and noble ladies. He was not lying, merely organizing events more sensibly, and so his tales had a taste of truth even to the canny Councilmen.”

— Peter S. Beagle

92. “He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. A terrible light poured from him like sweat, and his roar started landslides flowing into one another. His horns were pale as scars.”

— Peter S. Beagle

93. “Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.”

— Peter S. Beagle

94. “I wish something would happen to me, something that would show me exactly how cruel and jealous and vengeful I can be. Then I could go back to gentleness because I chose it over brutality for its own sake, not because I didn’t have the courage to be cruel. I might even like cruelty. I doubt very much that I would, but I ought to find out.”

— Peter S. Beagle

95. “He is a true hero,” she said, “a dragonslayer, a giantkiller, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he’s a good man as well. They aren’t always.”

— Peter S. Beagle

96. “The long road hurried to nowhere and had no end.”

— Peter S. Beagle

97. “You’re in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no.”

— Peter S. Beagle

98. “If a man loved me, I would have talked myself into loving him, and I would have loved him very deeply after a while.”

— Peter S. Beagle

99. “I feel a whole country growing inside me, thousands of years, millions of people, stupid, crazy, shrewd people, and all of them me. I never felt like that before, I never felt that there was anything inside me, even myself.”

— Peter S. Beagle

100. “Man searches constantly for identity, he thought as he trotted along the gravel path. He has no real proof of this existence except for the reaction of other people to that fact. So he listens very closely to what people say to one another about him, whether it’s good or bad, because it indicates that he lives in the same world they do, and that all his fears about being invisible, impotent, lacking some mysterious dimension that other people have, are groundless.”

— Peter S. Beagle