Peter S. Beagle

I am infected with life and will die of it in time.

I walked a long way that night, thinking many philosophic thoughts which, fortunately, I don’t remember.

You’re greediest when you’re born, and after that it’s downhill all the way. Live to be two hundred and you wouldn’t demand anything.

He sighed, telling himself that the inevitable is a great blessing to a man weary of making choices.

There is no such thing as abstract justice. There is such a thing as law. The difference should be apparent.

There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous.

I’m sure I’ll go to heaven. I’ve been dull enough.

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

It’s like marriage. The race there is between total knowledge of each other and death. If death comes first, it’s considered a successful marriage.

If I sound petty and malicious, it’s because I am.

Now is it their friendship I want, he wondered, or their dependency?…Am I so tired and so purposeless that I want to keep them with me forever, living off their need and their loneliness? You can’t do that, Jonathan. They are minds, and you cannot make minds dependent on you. That would surely make you the devil.

He knew very well that the great majority of human conversation is meaningless. A man can get through most of his days on stock answers to stock questions, he thought. Once he catches onto the game, he can manage with an assortment of grunts. This would not be so if people listened to each other, but they don’t. They know that no one is going to say anything moving and important to them at that very moment. Anything important will be announced in the newspapers and reprinted for those who missed it. No one really wants to know how his neighbor is feeling, but he asks him anyway, because it is polite, and because he knows that his neighbor certainly will not tell him how he feels. What this woman and I say to each other is not important. It is the simple making of sounds that pleases us.