Peter S. Beagle

Quotes

1. Funny that I should become such a great believer in justice. I always used to open my history courses by telling the students that if they expected to hear a series of movie scenarios, with the good guys winning in the end, they might as well all go home because not only didn’t the good guys win, but there weren’t any good guys.

   p. 206

2. 

   Love is not an excuse for bad taste.

   p. 232

3. 

   Beautiful is a word for young people. Beauty is a phase you grow through, like acne.

   p. 110

4. 

   What can I tell you, Laura? That I confused justice and revenge? People do that a great deal, and they always have.

   p. 206

5. 

   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.

6. 

   The prince said, "Who is she Molly? What kind of woman is it who believes — who knows, for I saw her face — that she can cure wounds with a touch, and who weeps without tears?" Molly went on about her work, still humming to herself. "Any woman can weep without tears," she answered over her shoulder, "and most can heal with her hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that's riddle enough."

7. 

   Prince Lír stood between her body and the Bull, weaponless, but with his hands up as though he thought he still held a sword and shield. Once more in that endless night the prince said, "No." He looked very foolish, and he was about to be trampled flat. The Red Bull could not see him, and would kill him without ever knowing that he had been in the way. Wonder and love and great sorrow shook Schmendrick the Magician then, and came together inside him and filled him, filled him until he felt himself brimming and flowing with something that was none of these. He did not believe it, but it came to him anyway, as it had touched him twice before and left him more barren than he had been. This time, there was too much of it for him to hold; it spilled through his fingers and toes, welled up equally in his eyes and his hair and the hollows of his shoulders. There was too much to hold — too much ever to use; and still he found himself weeping with the pain of his impossible greed. He thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.

8. 

   He was not lying, merely organizing events more sensibly.

9. 

   But Molly pushed him aside and went up to the unicorn, scolding her as though she were a strayed milk cow. "Where have you been?" Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shining beetle, but this time it was the unicorn's old dark eyes that looked down. "I am here now," she said at last. Molly laughed with her lips flat. "And what good is that to me that you're here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you come to me now, when I am this?" ... The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, "She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world." "She would be." Molly sniffed. "It would be the last unicorn in the world that comes to Molly Grue."

10. 

    To the memory of Dr. Olfert Dapper, who saw a wild unicorn in the Maine woods in 1673, and for Robert Nathan, who has seen one or two in Los Angeles.

11. 

    The unicorn lived in a lilac wood and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.

12. 

    That's a good curse, that's a professional job. I always say, whatever you're having done, go to an expert. It pays in the long run.