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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
1fd1690	Unicorns know naught of shame, or need, or doubt, or debt; But mortals, as you may have noticed, take what they can get.		schmendrick unicorn wizard	Peter S. Beagle
f2677e7	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 my name, the young priests throw pieces of themselves at my stone feet. I am white corn, and the wind in the corn, and the earth whereof the corn stands up, and the blind worms rolled in an oozy ball of love at the corn's roots. I am rut and flo..			Peter S. Beagle
ac918cb	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 like starlight.			Peter S. Beagle
39a53be	If he had even blinked, she would have been gone; but he did not blink, and he held her, as he had learned to hold griffins and chimeras motionless with his steady gaze. Her bare feet wounded him deeper than any tusk or riving talon ever had, but he was a true hero.		love wounded	Peter S. Beagle
16af5ed	You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.			Peter S. Beagle
b186309	Alarm clocks were going off in the city now. One after another, sometimes two or three together, they drove their small silver knives into the body of the great dream that sprawled naked on the housetops. Sensual, amiable, and defenseless as it was, it would still take a little while to die.		alarm-clocks amiable death-of-sleep defenseless small-silver-knives the-city the-great-dream waking-up morning	Peter S. Beagle
fd181d1	Sure, she loves him. But they've got two different ideas of love. He wants to dance with her on a terrace with a full moon and a thirty-six-piece orchestra; he wants to go singing through storms with her, like Gene Kelly. She knows about thirty-six-piece orchestras. You have to feed them, and then there's nothing left for the children.		love full-moon gene-kelly singin-in-the-rain thirty-six-piece-orchestras practicality	Peter S. Beagle
efc66ef	The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door.		humor shoplifting opening-lines meat	Peter S. Beagle
99360f2	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 way, and who can say that the ending would have been even as happy as this? You must be their king, and you must rule them as kindly as you would a braver and more faithful folk. For they are your fate."			Peter S. Beagle
c1396b6	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
f0da447	Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal.		sleep immortality jonathan-rebeck	Peter S. Beagle
bba291f	Because that world's gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can't make that other one real again. It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, a..		peter-beagle perspective	Peter S. Beagle
afd9351	The stars were going out now, one by one, dropping like pennies behind the television aerials and the skylights and the washing strung between the chimneys. The sky was still dark - a sated, navy-blue woman - but the grass was jittery with the expectation of dawn.		stars daybreak skylights television-aerials dawn morning	Peter S. Beagle
c7297f0	I was one of the haves, and one of the secrets of being a have is not wasting your time on empathy.			Peter S. Beagle
8048d89	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
478559c	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 announ..		relationships conversation status-quo listening politeness	Peter S. Beagle
9a1bff1	They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.		impermanence morning	Peter S. Beagle
db4a6e4	Stories never end. We end.			Peter S. Beagle
f583e60	How terrible to be forgotten by the god that made you, even if you're just a room. How could you love something that could do that anytime?			Peter S. Beagle
3483367	It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?			Peter S. Beagle
5b65060	You may plant your acres again and raise up your fallen orchard and vineyards, but they will never flourish as they used to, never--until you learn to take joy in them, for no reason.			Peter S. Beagle
8f4b98f	The unicorn] sighed and plodded on, both amused and disappointed. It serves you right, she told herself. You know better than to expect a butterfly to know your name. All they know are songs and poetry, and anything else they hear. They mean well, but they can't keep things straight. And why should they, they die so soon.		poetry songs unicorns	Peter S. Beagle
d8b508f	She loved him too. That's why she let him go.			Peter S. Beagle
925abc1	The unicorn was weary of human beings. Watching her companions as they slept, seeing the shadows of their dreams scurry over their faces, she would feel herself bending under the heaviness of knowing their names. Then she would run until morning to ease the ache: swifter than rain, swift as loss, racing to catch up with the time when she had known nothing at all but the sweetness of being herself.			Peter S. Beagle
726a689	We give them different names, those nights lit only by fire and the moon, depending on the country and the calendar, but we know what they are. They call up the world that was before the Lord came down among us; the world where good and evil were not so certain, so fixed as they are today, where the known and the unheard-of could mingle as they chose...where truth had its doubts, do you see? (By Moonlight)			Peter S. Beagle
b4e6fd8	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 hunger as her homage. She thought of the hunter's great-grandmother, and wondered what it must be like to grow old, and to cry.			Peter S. Beagle
37bb439	The unicorn was gray and still. "There is magic on me," she said. "Why did you not tell me?" "I thought you knew," the magician answered gently. "After all, didn't you wonder how it could be that they recognized you?" Then he smiled, which made him look a little older. "No, of course not. You never would wonder about that." "There has never been a spell on me before," the unicorn said. She shivered long and deep. "There has never been a wor..			Peter S. Beagle
f1bac98	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 fleet.		humor farm land	Peter S. Beagle
f0d6a10	You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention. [...] Never run. [...] Walk slowly, and pretend to be thinking of something else. Sing a song, say a poem, do your tricks, but walk slowly and she may not follow.		fantasy immortals	Peter S. Beagle
8008a94	It cannot be an ill fortune to have loved a unicorn,			Peter S. Beagle
fc503a8	Any woman can weep without tears," she answered over her shoulder, "and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that's riddle enough."			Peter S. Beagle
6266f65	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.			Peter S. Beagle
572549a	Like that Chinese monkey trying to grab the moon in the water," Uncle Chaim said to me once. "That's me, a Chinese monkey." (Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel)"			Peter S. Beagle
d28983d	I love you," Laura said hopelessly. "I'd love you if you were afraid of everything in the world."			Peter S. Beagle
9fd64ae	The unicorn had all the world in her eyes, all the world I'm never going to see, but it doesn't matter, because now I have seen it, and it's beautiful, and I was in there too.			Peter S. Beagle
de37a20	All right, all right for you, you pretentious kneecap! How would you like a punch in the eye?		kneecaps pretentious-kneecaps schmendrick last-unicorn peter-s-beagle pretentiousness insults	Peter S. Beagle
59b6ac7	Anyway, since you and I must choose one road to follow, out of the many that run to the same place in the end, it might as well be a road that a unicorn has taken. We may never see her, but we will always know where she has been. Come, then. Come with me. So they began their new journey, which took them in its time in and out of most of the folds of the sweet, wicked, wrinkled world, and so at last to their own strange and wonderful destiny..			Peter S. Beagle
be52fcb	What use is wizardry if it cannot save a unicorn?" He gripped the magician's shoulder hard, to keep from falling. Schmendrick did not turn his head. With a touch of sad mockery in his voice, he said, "That's what heroes are for."			Peter S. Beagle
5077a1a	He is a true hero," she said, "a dragonslayer, a giantkiller, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he's a good man as well. They aren't always." --		heroes	Peter S. Beagle
504d667	When your life is all taking, what need to learn courtship? Carcharos's passion for Jassi Belnarak deepened and darkened with every sleepless night, but it did not keep him from understanding that neither beneficence nor meek wistfulness would win her honestly. Power would have to do, after all; and I think that for the only time in that bad life, Carcharos may truly have regretted the necessity of forcing his will on another person. The mo..			Peter S. Beagle
cd176e4	Man searches constantly for identity, he thought as he trotted along the gravel path. He has no real proof of this existence except for the reaction of other people to that fact. So he listens very closely to what people say to one another about him, whether it's good or bad, because it indicates that he lives in the same world they do, and that all his fears about being invisible, impotent, lacking some mysterious dimension that other peop..		proof-of-existence jonathan-rebeck invisible	Peter S. Beagle
f166573	I love whom I love			Peter S. Beagle
d06f857	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.		marriage laura-durand michael-morgan successful-marriage	Peter S. Beagle
55f4924	That is exactly what heroes are for. Wizards make no difference, so they say that nothing does, but heroes are meant to die for unicorns.		wizardry unicorns	Peter S. Beagle

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