299 Quotes by Peter S. Beagle

The whistling of a ghost is like no other sound in a fistful of universes, because it is woven of all the whistles the ghost has ever heard, and so it usually includes train moans, lunch whistles, fire alarms, and the affronted-virgin screaming of tea kettles.

But the Lady Amalthea and Prince Lir walked and spoke and sang together as blithely as though King Haggard's castle had become a green wood, wild and shadowy with spring. They climbed the crooked towers like hills, picnicked in stone meadows under a stone sky, and splashed up and down stairways that had softened and quickened into streams.

I've never really undestood," the unicorn mused as the man picked himself up," what you dream of doing with me, once you've caught me."The man leaped again, and she slipped away from him like rain. "I don't think you know yourself," she said.

I didn't know unicorns had names," I said. "I didn't know they ever loved people.""They don't. Only this one." He turned and walked away swiftly, saying over his shoulder, "Her name was Amalthea.

She did not look anything like a horned horse, as unicorns are often pictured, being smaller and cloven-hoofed, and possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in dancing mockery.

All around Molly there flowed and flowered a light as impossible as snow set afire, while thousands of cloven hooves sang by like cymbals. She stood very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy was too great for her body to understand.

I was born mortal, and I have been immortal for a long, foolish time, and one day I will be mortal again; so I know something that a unicorn cannot know. Whatever can die is beautiful--more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world.

How can it be?" she wondered. "I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns (...) But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else — what do they look to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?

Christ, that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again.