Quotes by Peter S. Beagle

I like being brave well enough, but I will be a lazy coward again if you think that would be better.

I am a good runner. There are many faster, but not so many for whom it has been as necessary to learn to become nothing but flight.

Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.

Unicorns know naught of shame, or need, or doubt, or debt;But mortals, as you may have noticed, take what they can get.

I wish something would happen to me, something that would show me exactly how cruel and jealous and vengeful I can be. Then I could go back to gentleness because I chose it over brutality for its own sake, not because I didnt have the courage to be cruel. I might even like cruelty. I doubt very much that I would, but I ought to find out.

He really would have done all that for her, you see, and done it believing hed burn in hell forever for doing it. He hadnt done it, and wouldnt had made her his anyway, but you see why hed have figured it did. Or maybe I saw it anyway, at the time. He was a maniac and a monster, but people dont love like that anymore. Or maybe its only the maniacs and monsters who do. I dont know.

I would have chosen any other than this for my prison. A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.

“Envy nobody. It is the true secret of happiness, or at least the only one I know. (By Moonlight)”

“I will miss it so,” she said beside him. “This hell of a place, I will miss it so much. This fat body, walking mud puddle, deceived by everything, this impossible, ruinous accident of a world, these people who would truly rather hurt one another than eat—oh, there is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do to stay here ten minutes longer. Oh, I will leave claw marks, I will drag mountains and forests away under my fingernails when I am dragged off. Such a stupid way to feel. I will be all dirty from clutching at this stupid planet, and the gods will laugh at me.”

“You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and Im not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.”

“Whatever can die is beautiful — more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?”

“Marveling at his own boldness, he said softly, I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.”

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