Peter S. Beagle famous quotes

Take me with you. For laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Laughing #Luck

Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Inspirational #Hero #Writing

You were the one who taught me," he said. "I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling. I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Hero #Sorrow #Together

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

#Life #Real #Sacrifice

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

#Heart #Names #Pieces

I'll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, 'The soul selects her own society.' I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, 'Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Sex #People #Soul

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

#Hero #Long #Forever

We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Dream

It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Taken #Men

The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch's door when she is already away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Uncles #Lying #Princess

..no meal is good enough to justify all the money and effort wasted in preparing it. It is an illusion and an expense. Live as I do, undeceived.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Effort #Meals #Illusion

...no place is more enchanted than where a unicorn has been born.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Unicorn #Enchanted #Born

What do men know? Because they have seen no unicorns for a while does not mean we have all vanished.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Mean #Men #Doe

They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Morning #People #Lasts

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

#Loneliness #Rain #Kids

there never is a happy ending because nothing ever ends.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Happy Endings #Ends

She said, "I will go no farther." "There is no choice. We can only go on." The magician said again. "We can only go on.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Choices #Goes On #Said

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

#Years #Twenties #Dare

Lir said, "It is my right. A hero is entitled to his happy ending, when it comes at last." But Schmendrick answered, "This is not the end, either for you or for her.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Hero #Lasts #Happy Endings

- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Love And Fear #Humans

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

#Eye #Moon #White

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

#Hero #Men #Pearls

He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. 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

#Dream #Twilight #Honor

Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger, And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Strong #Way #May

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

#Choices #Gone #Needs

...because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Thinking #Want #Way

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

#Space #Worry #Way

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

#Mean #Fate #Sake

There's a phrase, "sitzfleisch", which means just plain sitting on your ***** and getting it done. Just showing up for work. My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, "If the muse is late for work, start without her". You have to be there. You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you're probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Uncles #Writing #Mean

Sing to me," she said. "That would be valiant, to raise your voice in this dark, lonely place, and it will be useful as well. Sing to me, sing loudly-drown out my dreams, keep me from remembering whatever wants me to remember it. Sing to me, my lord prince, if it please you. It may not seem a hero's task, but I would be glad of it.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Dream #Lonely #Hero

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

#Fear

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

#Dream #History #Honor

The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things...Things must happen when it is time for them to happen.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Patience #Lying #Hero

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

#Hero #Two #Young

The Unicorn Sonata ... tells us that our true home is often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes - and our ears - to find it.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Home #Eye #Ears

I am afraid! It is not starving I fear, or talking to people, or even being alone. But I cannot bear to be useless and ineffectual. There must be some meaning to me, if not to my life; there must surely be some purpose that has my name written on it. If this is not so, if I am deceiving myself about this too, then why should I want to become real? What reason have I to live anywhere?
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Real #Talking #Names

Ah. My story. Are you certain you wish to hear it? It is long, unlikely, and remarkably unedifying -- shameful, even, to come from a minister's lips. Blasphemous, too, properly regarded.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Long #Wish #Stories

Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Loneliness #Rain #Kids

Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to - you write because you can't not write. The rest is show-business. I can't state that too strongly. Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you're writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Confused #Writing #Play

You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Real #People #Watches

I am infected with life and will die of it in time.
-- Peter S. Beagle

Avicenna California...Museum of my twisted youth, vault of my dearest and most disgusting memories.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Memories #California #Museums

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

#Thinking #Waste #Elbows

Unicorn. Old French, unicorne. Latin, unicornis. Literally, one-horned: unus, one and cornu,a horn. A fabulous animal resembling a horse with one horn.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Horse #Latin #Animal

There are no happy endings, because nothing ends.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Happy Endings #Ends

The horns came riding in like the rainbow masts of silver ships.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Rainbow #Horny #Ships

A Clock is not time; it's numbers and springs. Pay it no mind.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Spring #Numbers #Mind

song of elli (old age) "What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain What is gone is gone... What is sea-born dies on land, Soft is trod upon. What is given burns the hand - What is gone is gone... Here is there, and high is low; All may be undone. What is true, no two men know - What is gone is gone... 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

#Song #Men #Hands

I know how to live here, I know how everything smells, and tastes, and is. What could I ever search for in the world, except this again?
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Smell #World #Taste

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

#Rain #Ravens #Two

Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard's castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts...
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Kings #Dark #Castles

For a moment she turned in a circle, staring at her hands, which she held high and useless, close to her breast. She bobbed and shambled like an ape doing a trick, and her face was the silly, bewildered face of a joker's victim. And yet she could make no move that was not beautiful. Her trapped terror was more lovely than any joy that Molly had ever seen, and that was the most terrible thing about it.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Beautiful #Silly #Moving

Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Voice #Air #Flavor

I am a king's daughter, And if I cared to care, The moon that has no mistress Would flutter in my hair. No one dares to cherish What I choose to crave. Never have I hungered, For that I did not have I am a kings daughter, And I grow old within The prison of my person, The shackles of my skin. And I would run away And beg from door to door, Just to see your shadow Once, and never more.
-- Peter S. Beagle

#Daughter #Running #Kings

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

#Perseverance #Art #Nine

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

#Country #Stupid #Crazy