Peter S. Beagle
Peter S. Beagle
Peter Soyer Beagleis an American novelist and screenwriter, especially fantasy fiction. His best-known work is The Last Unicorn, a fantasy novel he wrote in his twenties, which Locus subscribers voted the number five "All-Time Best Fantasy Novel" in 1987. During the last twenty-five years he has won several literary awards including a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2011...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth20 April 1939
CountryUnited States of America
What use is magic if it can't save a unicorn?
Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl.
You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm 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.
But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me — me, Jenny Gluckstein — like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is one thing — recognition is something else.
The unicorn halted in her slow, desperate round of the cage, realizing for the first time that the magician understood her speech. He smiled, and she saw that his face was frighteningly young for a grown man-untraveled by time, unvisited by grief or wisdom. "I know you," he said.
Who has choices need not choose. We must, who have none. We can love but what we lose-- What is gone is gone.
What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain-- What is gone is gone.
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.
The Unicorn Sonata ... tells us that our true home is often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes - and our ears - to find it.
When I was very young every grownup was a hero. It's been all downhill since then, and I have only two left.
The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things...Things must happen when it is time for them to happen.
We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.
..no meal is good enough to justify all the money and effort wasted in preparing it. It is an illusion and an expense. Live as I do, undeceived.
They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.