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
- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.
My son, your ineptitude is so vast, your incompetence so profound, that I am certain you are inhabited by greater power than I have ever known.
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)
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.
What use is wizardry if it cannot save a Unicorn?
The moon was gone, but to the magician's eyes the unicorn was the moon, cold and white and very old, lighting his way to safety, or to madness.
Unicorn. Old French, unicorne. Latin, unicornis. Literally, one-horned: unus, one and cornu,a horn. A fabulous animal resembling a horse with one horn.
The tune was wailing and mournful, almost flagrantly so, and the total effect was of a heartbroken piccolo being parted forever from its bagpipe lover.
Who has choices need not choose. We must, who have none. We can love but what we lose-- What is gone is gone.
All lives are composed of two basic elements," the squirrel said, "purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rain—this is nothing beside a life without poetry.
As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn't say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.
Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger, And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.
The last unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
I'll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, 'The soul selects her own society.' I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, 'Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.