Quotes by Peter S. Beagle

Ravens bring things to people. Were like that. Its our nature. We dont like it.

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

We are all ghosts, Morris Klapper said at last. We are conceived in a moment of death and born out of ghost wombs, and we play in the streets with other little ghosts, chanting ghost-rhymes and scratching to become real. We are told that life is full of goals and that, although it is sadly necessary to fight, you can at least choose your war. But we learn that for ghosts there can only be one battle: to become real. A few of us make it, thus encouraging other ghosts to believe it can be done.

When we go to the fair in disguise, we never win at archery or at singlestick. We do get some nice compliments on our disguises, but no more than that.

I will kill you if you set me free, the eyes said. Set me free.

Under the moon, the road that ran from the edge of her forest gleamed like water, but when she stepped out onto it, away from the trees, she felt how hard it was, and how long. She almost turned back then; but instead she took a deep breath of the woods air that still drifted to her, and held it in her mouth like a flower, as long as she could.

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

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 its 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 people have, are groundless.

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

We dont steal from the rich and give to the poor. We steal from the poor because they cant fight back --most of them-- and the rich take from us because they could wipe us out in a day.

The woman I loved died because I did not love her enough - what greater sin is there than that?(Uncle Chaim and Aunt Fifke and the Angel)

When I was a young man and very well thought of,I couldnt ask aught that the ladies denied.I nibbled their hearts like a handful of raisins,And I never spoke love but I knew that I lied. But I said to myself, Ah, they none of them know The secret I shelter and savor and save I wait for the one who will see through my seeming, And Ill know when I love by the way I behave.The years drifted over like clouds in the heavens;The ladies went by me like snow on the wind.I charmed and I cheated, deceived and dissembled,And I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned. But I said to myself, Ah, they none of them see Theres part of me pure as the whisk of a wave. My lady is late but shell find Ive been faithful, And Ill know when I love by the way I behave.At last came a lady both knowing and tender,Saying, youre not at all what they take you to be.I betrayed her before she had quite finished speaking,And she swallowed cold poison and jumped in the sea. And I say to myself when theres time for a word, As I gracefully grow more debauched and depraved, Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.

I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You dont understand. Never mind.

Because that worlds gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world cant make that other one real again. Its like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we dont 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 doesnt blow anymore?

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 dont. 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.

Youre in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no.

Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.

The air was motionless, carved, a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth, molded while soft to fit every house and every human being on the earth, and now hardened forever so that no man could move and no air ever came through. The earth rumbled down its alley like a golden bowling ball, shining.

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.

Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal.