I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove. They wash me in the stream every summer and sing over me. I am skulls and cocks, spring rain and the blood of the bull. Virgins lie with strangers in m...
I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.
I didn't know unicorns had names, I said. I didn't know they ever loved people.They don't. Only this one. He turned and walked away swiftly, saying over his shoulder, Her name was Amalthea.
I hate selkie stories. They're always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said What's this...
I love whom I love.
I sometimes think that a little fear, a little hunger, might be good for us—sharpen our souls,
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.
It cannot be an ill fortune to have loved a unicorn,
It’s whatever we can get, then, she said, on whatever terms we can get it.
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.
Nay, Cully, you have it backward, she called to him. There's no such a person as you, or me, or any of us. Robin and Marian are real, and we are the legend!
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.
No, she said, answering his eyes. I can never regret.[...]I can sorrow, she offered gently, but it's not the same thing.
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 somethi...
She heard hearts bounce, tears brewing, and breath going backward, but nobody said a word. By the sorrow and loss and sweetness in their faces she knew that they recognized her, and she accepted their...
Still I have read, or heard it sung, that unicorns when time was young, could tell the difference ’twixt the two—the false shining and the true, the lips’ laugh and the heart’s rue.
Still the king would have turned away, but Schmendrick touched his arm and leaned near. It's true, you know, he whispered. But for him--but for them all--the tale would have worked out quite another w...
That’s the true test of a town, or of a king. A lord who cheats an ugly old witch will cheat his own folk by and by. Stop him while you can, before you grow used to him.
The secret of my long life is that nothing has ever been dull for me. For all my life I have been interested in everything I saw and been anxious to see more. But I cannot stand to be bored, and I wil...
The spaciousness of it astounds me; this is the kind of country you dream of running away to when you are very young and innocently hungry, before you learn that all land is owned by somebody, that yo...
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