Top 180 Peter S. Beagle Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Schmendrick smiled then. “I’m no man,” he said. “I’m a magician with no magic, and that’s no one at all.”

— Peter S. Beagle

152. “But she knew beyond both hope and vanity that men had changed, and the world with them, because the unicorns were gone.”

— Peter S. Beagle

153. “Oh, it’s a beautiful day, it’s an elegant, graceful day, and I’m sailing down the Strip in glamorous Las Vegas, on my motor scooter, in company with a certified illegal prostitute who loves poetry and remembers it. Sonofabitch, I’m a real writer! I used to worry about it, but no more. Life is good.”

— Peter S. Beagle

154. “You are the king of a wasted land where there has never been any king but fear. Your true task has just begun, and you may not know in your life if you have succeeded in it, but only if you fail.”

— Peter S. Beagle

155. “There are no happy endings, he knew, because nothing ends; and if there were any being dispensed, a great many worthier people would be in line for them long before Michael and Laura and himself. But the happiness of the unworthy and the happiness of the so-so is as fragile and self-centered and dear as the happiness of the righteous and the worthy; and the happiness of the living is no less short and desperate and forgotten than the joys of the dead.”

— Peter S. Beagle

156. “We are all ghosts,” Morris Klapper said at last. “We are conceived in a moment of death and born out of ghost wombs, and we play in the streets with other little ghosts, chanting ghost-rhymes and scratching to become real. We are told that life is full of goals and that, although it is sadly necessary to fight, you can at least choose your war. But we learn that for ghosts there can only be one battle: to become real. A few of us make it, thus encouraging other ghosts to believe it can be done.”

— Peter S. Beagle

157. “The unicorn waited, feeling the days of her life falling around her with the rain.”

— Peter S. Beagle

158. “I promised only that you would see some sign of unicorns, and so you have. Your realm is blessed beyond any land’s deserving because they have passed across it in freedom. 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. Think of that, and be still.”

— Peter S. Beagle

159. “It’s not much of a job, but I’ve had worse, and I’ll have better one day. This is not the end.” But.”

— Peter S. Beagle

160. “I would have chosen any other than this for my prison. 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

161. “That is most of it, being a wizard – seeing and listening.”

— Peter S. Beagle

162. “She was one woman who knew what to do with a slight moral edge. The.”

— Peter S. Beagle

163. “How can anything that is going to die be real?”

— Peter S. Beagle

164. “Not all the magic in the world can help her now. If she will not fight him, she must go into the sea with the others. Neither magic nor murder will help her.”

— Peter S. Beagle

165. “I’ve never really understood,” the unicorn mused as the man picked himself up, “what you dream of doing with me, once you’ve caught me.” The man leaped again, and she slipped away from him like rain. “I don’t think you know yourselves,” she said.”

— Peter S. Beagle

166. “I have ended my betrothal to the princess I had agreed to marry – and if you don’t think that was a heroic deed, you don’t know her mother.”

— Peter S. Beagle

167. “But no hero can stand before her, no god can wrestle her down, no magic can keep her out – or in, for she’s no prisoner of ours. Even while we exhibit her here, she is walking among you, touching and taking. For Elli is Old Age.”

— Peter S. Beagle

168. “I don’t think I could ever see her closely,” the sentinel replied, “however close she came.”

— Peter S. Beagle

169. “The unicorn was so startled and so happy to hear her name spoken at last that she overlooked the remark about the horse. “Oh, you know me!” she cried, and the breath of her delight blew the butterfly twenty feet away.”

— Peter S. Beagle

170. “I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling.”

— Peter S. Beagle

171. “It’s not enough to be ready to see – you have to be looking all the time.”

— Peter S. Beagle

172. “The Last Unicorn.”

— Peter S. Beagle

173. “Anyone can say he’s a magician these days. The old standards are gone, the old values have been abandoned. Besides, a real magician has a beard.”

— Peter S. Beagle

174. “Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things.” “Who knows? Times change. Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?”

— Peter S. Beagle

175. “Julie raised her face, gasping and hiccuping, and he saw clearly how she would look when she was old. “Baby,” he said, and began helplessly kissing lines and hollows and wounds that were not there yet, sick with tenderness and fear.”

— Peter S. Beagle

176. “Rhinoceri are not questing beasts, but young girls are.”

— Peter S. Beagle

177. “Tamsin laughed that spring-rain laugh of hers. “Alas, my poor Jenny – awash in hobgoblins, besieged by bogles. Truly, there are no such creatures in your New York?” “Only in junior high school,” I said. “Never mind. Just introduce me as they come along.”

— Peter S. Beagle

178. “Christ, that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again.”

— Peter S. Beagle

179. “It is said that love makes men swift and women slow.”

— Peter S. Beagle

180. “Their faces were as beautiful as though they had never known fear.”

— Peter S. Beagle

181. “And in the whiteness, of the whiteness, flowering in the tattered water, their bodies arching with the streaked marble hollows of the waves, their manes and tails and the fragile beards of the males burning in the sunlight, their eyes as dark and jeweled as the deep sea – and the shining of the horns, the seashell shining of the horns! The horns came riding in like the rainbow masts of silver ships.”

— Peter S. Beagle

182. “She stood very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy was too great for her body to understand.”

— Peter S. Beagle