Peter S Beagle Quotes

What magical thing could you want so badly that they take you away from the known world for wanting it?

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?

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.

I think that 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.... I wo...

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...

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.

I like being brave well enough, but I will be a lazy coward again if you think that would be better.

There was nothing for it now but to throw himself on Campos's mercy, and it had been Mr. Rebeck's experience of mercy that it had a tendency to buckle under the weight of a human soul.

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,...

And at last she woke up in the middle of one warm night and said, Yes, but now.

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.

The enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. Still

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

He really would have done all that for her, you see, and done it believing he'd burn in hell forever for doing it. He hadn't done it, and wouldn't had made her his anyway, but you see why he'd have fi...

Your topsoil's a disaster area — it's starved for nitrogen, it's been fertilized for years by the criminally insane, and whatever thief put in your irrigation system ought to be flogged through the fl...

How can we delight in our good fortune when we know that it must end, and that one of us will end it? Every day makes us richer, and brings us one day nearer to our doom.

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.

Now I knew you for aunicorn when I first saw you, and I know that I am your friend. Yet you take me for a clown, or aclod, or a betrayer, and so must I be if you see me so. The magic on you is only ma...

I love you, Laura said hopelessly. I'd love you if you were afraid of everything in the world.

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.