Beagle Quotes

His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was "like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it."

There was, however, an analogy that might help. "I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania."...it had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory:

Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens. In burying the kitten you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there's no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with five tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises ~ John Lewis Gaddis

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

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. ~ Peter S. Beagle

He is a true hero," she said, "a dragonslayer, a giantkiller, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he's a good man as well. They aren't always. ~ Peter S. Beagle

We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Only the spider paid no mind when the unicorn called softly to her through the open door. Arachne was busy with a web which looked to her as though the Milky Way had begun to fall like snow. The unicorn whispered, 'Weaver, freedom is better, freedom is better,' but the spider fled unhearing up and down her iron loom. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Tell you something," the raven said. "I was flying over the Midwest once." He stopped abruptly, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, and began again. "I was flying over the Midwest. Iowa or Illinois, or some place like that. And I saw this big damn seagull. Right in the middle of Iowa, a seagull. And he was flying around in big, wide circles, real sweeping circles, the way a seagull flies, flapping his wings just enough to keep on the updrafts. Every time he saw water he'd go flying down toward it, yelling, "I found it! I found it!" The poor sonofabitch was looking for the ocean. And every time he saw water, he thought that was the ocean. He didn't know anything about ponds or lakes or anything. All the water he ever saw was the ocean. He thought that was all the water there was. ~ Peter S. Beagle

And it's not my place to chase around after you, fixing stuff. What I know's what I know, and it don't include putting the world back the way it out to be. It's too late for that. Way too late for heroes, champions, miracles. Don't matter what our heritage was maybe meant for - your side got hold of it first, and you won long ago. No undoing that, Esau, I ain't fool enough to think otherwise. I'm still sorry for you, but I know your side's won, this side of the grave. ~ Peter S. Beagle

When your life is all taking, what need to learn courtship? Carcharos's passion for Jassi Belnarak deepened and darkened with every sleepless night, but it did not keep him from understanding that neither beneficence nor meek wistfulness would win her honestly. Power would have to do, after all; and I think that for the only time in that bad life, Carcharos may truly have regretted the necessity of forcing his will on another person. The moment can't have lasted long, but I think further that it may have been the closest Carcharos ever came to knowing love. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Stories never end. We end. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Farrell had seen pure white drunkenness before, but not often enough to recognize it at sight. He knew the thing itself, however
the freight train rattling and lurching comically from hilarity to slobbering sorrow, picking up speed as it passed through wild, aimless anger straight on into wild sickness; and then, running smoothly and almost silently now, into a dark place of shaking and sweating and crying, and out again with no warning to where a dazzling snowy light made everything very still. ~ Peter S. Beagle

What use is wizardry if it cannot save a Unicorn? ~ Peter S. Beagle

And Hagsgate, alas, paid her no heed. She was treated politely and referred to the proper authorities, whereupon she flew into a fury and screamed that in our eagerness to make no enemies at all, we had now made two. ~ Peter S. Beagle

You must remind me, little one. When I... when I lose myself - when I lose her - you must remind me that I am still searching, still waiting... that I have never forgotten her, never turned from all she taught me. I sit in this place... I sit... because a king has to sit, you see... but in my mind, in my poor mind, I am always away with her.... ~ Peter S. Beagle

There's a phrase, "sitzfleisch", which means just plain sitting on your ass and getting it done. Just showing up for work. My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, "If the muse is late for work, start without her". You have to be there. You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you're probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow. ~ Peter S. Beagle

I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove. They wash me in the stream every summer and sing over me. I am skulls and cocks, spring rain and the blood of the bull. Virgins lie with strangers in my name, the young priests throw pieces of themselves at my stone feet. I am white corn, and the wind in the corn, and the earth whereof the corn stands up, and the blind worms rolled in an oozy ball of love at the corn's roots. I am rut and flood and honeybees. ~ Peter S. Beagle

It's really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space
that's the way life was meant to be. You're supposed to be too late for some things. Don't worry about it. ~ Peter S. Beagle

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. ~ Peter S. Beagle

The encouragement I got from Campbell was a quick check and praise. Once the Space Beagle was launched on its mission, it seemed natural for it to breed additional thoughts. ~ A.E. Van Vogt

Only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power. ~ Peter S. Beagle

The Cat: When the wine drinks itself, when the skull speaks, when the clock strikes the right time, only then will you find the tunnel that leads to the Red Bull. There be a trick to it, of course. ~ Peter S. Beagle

The magician was studying her face with his green eyes. "Your face is wet," he said worriedly. "I hope that's spray. If you've become human enough to cry, then no magic in the world - oh, it must be spray. Come with me. It had better be spray. ~ Peter S. Beagle

I don't think I could ever see her closely," the sentinel replied, "however close she came." His own voice was hushed and regretful, echoing with lost chances. "She has a newness," he said. "Everything is for the first time. See how she moves, how she walks, how she turns her head -- all for the first time, the first time anyone has ever done these things. See how she draws her breath and lets it go again, as though no one else in the world knew that air was good. It is all for her. If I learned that she had been born this very morning, I would only be surprised that she was so old." The second sentinel stared down from his tower at the three wanderers. The tall man saw him first, and next the dour woman. Their eyes reflected nothing but his armor, grim and cankered and empty. But then the girl in the ruined black cloak raised her head, and he stepped back from the parapet, putting out one tin glove against her glance. In a moment she passed into the shadow of the castle with her companions, and he lowered his hand. "She may be mad," he said calmly. "No grown girl looks like that unless she is mad. That would be annoying, but far preferable to the remaining possibility." "Which is?" the younger man prompted after a silence.
"Which is that she was indeed born this morning. I would rather that she were mad. ~ Peter S. Beagle

She has a newness," he said. "Everything is for the first time. See how she moves, how she walks, how she turns her head - all for the first time, the first time anyone has ever done these things. See how she draws her breath and lets it go again, as though no one else in the world knew that air was good. It is all for her. If I learned that she had been born this very morning, I would only be surprised that she was so old. ~ Peter S. Beagle

I sometimes think that a little fear, a little hunger, might be good for us - sharpen our souls, ~ Peter S. Beagle

The enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. Still ~ Peter S. Beagle

So we have this eyesore on the property.
No, it's not the beagle. I can understand why you'd think that, though. ~ Ursula Vernon

Hell of an ornithologist you'd make. ~ Peter S. Beagle

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? ~ Peter S. Beagle

I feel a whole country growing inside me, thousands of years, millions of people, stupid, crazy, shrewd people, and all of them me. I never felt like that before, I never felt that there was anything inside me, even myself. ~ Peter S. Beagle

When the wind changes, and you smell the new moon and dance off over the hills and far away, the only heart broken around here will be the goat's. I want you to understand that. You are a miracle, yes, truly - the one miracle of my life - but miracles do not break the heart. Foolish, ridiculous things do that, songs do that, smells do that, everyday stupidities do that... ~ Peter S. Beagle

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 it's 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. ~ Peter S. Beagle

You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact. Let it end here then, let the quest end. Is the world any the worse for losing the unicorns, and would it be any better if they were running free again? One good woman more in the world is worth every single unicorn gone. Let it end. Marry the prince and live happily ever after. The ~ Peter S. Beagle

Alarm clocks were going off in the city now. One after another, sometimes two or three together, they drove their small silver knives into the body of the great dream that sprawled naked on the housetops. Sensual, amiable, and defenseless as it was, it would still take a little while to die. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Wisdom is finding joy in bewilderment ~ Peter S. Beagle

But I'm always dreaming, even when I'm awake; it is never finished. ~ Peter S. Beagle

I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Over the course of two years, from June 2004 to June 2006, two separate deaths did nothing to ease my overall anxiety. Steve's beloved Staffordshire bull terrier Sui died of cancer in June 2004. He had set up his swag and slept beside her all night, talking to her, recalling old times in the bush catching crocodiles, and comforting her.
Losing Sui brought up memories of losing Chilli a decade and a half earlier. "I am not getting another dog," Steve said. "It is just too painful."
Wes, the most loyal friend anyone could have, was there for Steve while Sui passed from this life to the next. Wes shared in Steve's grief. They had known Sui longer than Steve and I had been together.
Two years after Sui's death, in June 2006, we lost Harriet. At 175, Harriet was the oldest living creature on earth. She had met Charles Darwin and sailed on the Beagle. She was our link to the past at the zoo, and beyond that, our link to the great scientist himself. She was a living museum and an icon of our zoo.
The kids and I were headed to Fraser Island, along the southern coast of Queensland, with Joy, Steve's sister, and her husband, Frank, our zoo manager, when I heard the news. An ultrasound had confirmed that Harriet had suffered a massive heart attack.
Steve called me. "I think you'd better come home."
"I should talk to the kids about this," I said.
Bindi was horrified. "How long is Harriet going to live?" she asked.
"Maybe hours, maybe days, but not ~ Terri Irwin

July 24th, 1833. - The Beagle sailed from Maldonado, and on August the 3rd she arrived off the mouth of the Rio Negro. ~ Charles Darwin

THE VOYAGE OF THE SPACE BEAGLE ~ A.E. Van Vogt

And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where where you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this? ~ Peter S. Beagle

I'm very expressive.
i deserve to feel pretty.
i kissed the blarney stone.
i am strong. i am brave.
im a good friend. I'm a good sister. I'm a good wife. i am a good in-law. I'm a good daughter. i am a good niece. I'm a good beagle mother. i am a good granddaughter.
i work hard for it, honey.
im superfly TNT motherfucker.
im a pilot of the airwaves.
im a better third baseman that brooks robinson.
I B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E.
i have exceptionally beautiful feet, eyes, ears, hips, hair, teeth, breasts. and shoulders. and fingernails. in a different pen, she added, and eyelashes and eyebrows, plus in yet another pen, and nose. and chin. ~ Rob Sheffield

You were the one who taught me," he said. "I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling. I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you. ~ Peter S. Beagle

What happened instead was that the tree fell in love with him and began to murmur fondly of the joy to be found in the eternal embrace of a red oak. "Always, always," it sighed, "faithful beyond any man's deserving. I will keep the color of your eyes when no other in the world remembers your name. There is no immortality but a tree's love. ~ Peter S. Beagle

When I was very young every grownup was a hero. It's been all downhill since then, and I have only two left. ~ Peter S. Beagle

If I danced with my feet As I dance in my dreaming, As graceful and gleaming As Death in disguise - Oh, that would be sweet, But then would I hunger To be ten years younger, Or wedded, or wise? The ~ Peter S. Beagle

Yet it would be nearly impossible to overstate Lyell's influence. The Principles of Geology went through twelve editions in his lifetime and contained notions that shaped geological thinking far into the twentieth century. Darwin took a first edition with him on the Beagle voyage and wrote afterwards that 'the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one's mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes22.' In short, he thought him nearly a god, as did many of his generation. It is a testament to the strength of Lyell's sway that in the 1980s, when geologists had to abandon just a part of his theory to accommodate the impact theory of extinctions, it nearly killed them. But that is another chapter. ~ Bill Bryson

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. ~ Peter S. Beagle

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. ~ Peter S. Beagle

There is only one spot in me that is as warm and placid as those cattle, and that is the part that knows quite surely that I will always be cold, that there will always be a wind hunting through me, and that I will always be hurrying before the coming darkness in search of a place that is not there. ~ Peter S. Beagle

His mind, grooved through the uncounted ages to ultimate despair, soared up insanely. His legs and arms glistened like tongues of living fire as they writhed and twisted in the light that blazed from the portholes. His mouth, a gash in his caricature of a human head, slavered a white frost that floated away in little frozen globules. ~ A.E. Van Vogt

No sorrow will live in me as long as that joy
save one, and I thank you for that, too. ~ Peter S. Beagle

[The unicorn] sighed and plodded on, both amused and disappointed. It serves you right, she told herself. You know better than to expect a butterfly to know your name. All they know are songs and poetry, and anything else they hear. They mean well, but they can't keep things straight. And why should they, they die so soon. ~ Peter S. Beagle

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission - his life. ...

Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded - Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer - everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book - it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."

But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...

The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...

The library, almost alone of the g ~ Archibald MacLeish

If sacrificing herself for her husband's sake were to prove the last thing that Jassi ever did willingly for her new master ... well, then, so be it, however bitter the taste to Carcharos. Pride had always been his substitute for honor, but his pride was so long gone from him that he could barely recall the feel of it. And so be that, too. ~ Peter S. Beagle

If there is one thing in this world that I was raised and trained to know, it is that there is only so much you may ask of the gods. Victory in battle is their lightest gift; a quiet heart is your own concern. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Assured that there would be a meal set aside for him somewhere, the beagle pulled his mind off the gnawing emptiness in his stomach, mounted the flattened stump, marched into the center and stood, stock-still, on his vein-coiled, burst of speed legs and gnarled paws--listening! ~ Kevin Moccia

The beagle and the kobold approached, walking out of the dusty distance. ~ Terry Pratchett

Anyone can say he's a magician these days. The old standards are gone, the old values have been abandoned. Besides, a real magician has a beard. ~ Peter S. Beagle

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. ~ Peter S. Beagle

I am no king, and I am no lord,
And I am no soldier at-arms," said he.
"I'm none but a harper, and a very poor harper,
That am come hither to wed with ye."
"If you were a lord, you should be my lord,
And the same if you were a thief," said she.
"And if you are a harper, you shall be my harper,
For it makes no matter to me, to me,
For it makes no matter to me."
"But what if it prove that I am no harper?
That I lied for your love most monstrously?"
"Why, then I'll teach you to play and sing,
For I dearly love a good harp," said she. ~ Peter S. Beagle

That's the true test of a town, or of a king. A lord who cheats an ugly old witch will cheat his own folk by and by. Stop him while you can, before you grow used to him. ~ Peter S. Beagle

No, he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king's voice ... whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give. ~ Peter S. Beagle

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. Before ~ Peter S. Beagle

The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career; yet it depended on so small a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive me 30 miles to Shrewsbury, which few uncles would have done, and on such a trifle as the shape of my nose. ~ Charles Darwin

How terrible to be forgotten by the god that made you, even if you're just a room. How could you love something that could do that anytime? ~ Peter S. Beagle

Unicorns are not to be forgiven." The magician felt himself growing giddy with jealousy, not only of the touch but of something like a secret that was moving between Molly and the unicorn. "Unicorns are for beginnings," he said, "for innocence and purity, for newness. Unicorns are for young girls."
Molly was stroking the unicorn's throat as timidly as though she were blind. She dried her grimy tears on the white mane. "You don't know much about unicorns," she said. ~ Peter S. Beagle

...she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by ~ Peter S. Beagle

What use is magic if it can't save a unicorn? ~ Peter S. Beagle

Pervy and redundant, don't you think?" I asked the big gay cop, who wouldn't know a va-jay-jay if it bounced up to him and sang the "Star-Spangled Banner." (You ever notice that hardly anything besides the "Star-Spangled Banner" is spangled? There's no, like, the Raisin-Spangled Scone, or the Flea-Spangled Beagle. I'm just saying.)
Being the Journal of Abby Normal ~ Christopher Moore

On April 16, 2010, 34 Chinese environmental organizations, including Friends of Nature, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, and Green Beagle, questioned heavy metal pollution in a letter sent to CEO Steve Jobs. ~ Ma Jun

How terrible it would be if all my people had been turned human by well-meaning wizards - exiled, ~ Peter S. Beagle

When you walk, you make an echo where they used to be. ~ Peter S. Beagle

The most professional curse ever snarled or croaked or thundered can have no effect on a pure heart. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Anyway, since you and I must choose one road to follow, out of the many that run to the same place in the end, it might as well be a road that a unicorn has taken. We may never see her, but we will always know where she has been. Come, then. Come with me.
So they began their new journey, which took them in its time in and out of most of the folds of the sweet, wicked, wrinkled world, and so at last to their own strange and wonderful destiny. ~ Peter S. Beagle

A hero is entitled to his happy ending, when it comes at last. ~ Peter S. Beagle

There is no such thing as a cat - it is just a shape that all manner of imps, hobs, and devilkins like to put on, to gain easy entrance into the homes of men. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Unicorns are immortal. It is their nature to live alone in one place: usually a forest where there is a pool clear enough for them to see themselves-for they are a little vain, knowing themselves to be the most beautiful creatures in all the world, and magic besides. They mate very rarely, and no place is more enchanted than one where a unicorn has been born. The last time she had seen another unicorn the young virgins who still came seeking her now and then had called to her in a different tongue; but then, she had no idea of months and years and centuries, or even of seasons. It was always spring in her forest, because she lived there, and she wandered all day among the great beech trees, keeping watch over the animals that lived in the ground and under bushes, in nests and caves, earths and treetops. Generation after generation, wolves and rabbits alike, they hunted and loved and had children and died, and as the unicorn did none of these things, she never grew tired of watching them. ~ Peter S. Beagle

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. ~ Peter S. Beagle

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. ~ Peter S. Beagle

During the meal Schmendrick told stories of his life as an errant enchanter, filling it with kings and dragons and noble ladies. He was not lying, merely organizing events more sensibly, and so his tales had a taste of truth even to the canny Councilmen. ~ Peter S. Beagle

It's a rare man who is taken for what he truly is. ~ Peter S. Beagle

What is plucked will grow again,
What is slain lives on,
What is stolen will remain
What is gone is gone. ~ Peter S. Beagle

The unicorn was gray and still. "There is magic on me," she said. "Why did you not tell me?"
"I thought you knew," the magician answered gently. "After all, didn't you wonder how it could be that they recognized you?" Then he smiled, which made him look a little older. "No, of course not. You never would wonder about that."
"There has never been a spell on me before," the unicorn said. She shivered long and deep. "There has never been a world in which I was not known. ~ Peter S. Beagle

When I was eighteen or twenty, I knew everything except what I wanted. I knew all about people, and poetry, and love, and music, and politics, and baseball, and history, and I played pretty good jazz piano. And then I went traveling, because I felt that I might have missed something and it would be a good idea to learn it before I got my master's degree. (...) And the older I grew, and the farther I traveled, the younger I grew and the less I knew. I could feel it happening to me. I could actually walk down a dirty street and feel all my wisdom slipping away from me, all the things I wrote term papers about. ~ Peter S. Beagle

A dream that returns so often is like to be a messenger, come to warn you of the future or to remind you of things untimely forgotten. ~ Peter S. Beagle

He thought of Darwin sleeping out on the pampas during his Beagle trip, a middle-class white kid travelling the world, the first of the backpackers. It was only afterwards, really, that he had made any sense of what he had seen. Alex wondered what, in the fullness of time, he himself would make sense of, what small, crucial detail might be lodging itself in his brain that would shake his life to its foundations. ~ Nino Ricci

My mother had seven children in seven years. No twins. She also had a three-legged beagle who was compelled to bite strangers, a freakishly big double-pawed tomcat who regularly left dead rabbits on the front doorstep, and 70 white mice that one or another of us had smuggled home from my father's research laboratory. ~ Rosemary Mahoney

Haven't you ever been in a fairy tale before? ~ Peter S. Beagle

Traditionally, people are always supposed to feel empty, devastated, when a god leaves them. Nobody seems to wonder how the god might feel. Leaving the only people who almost understood. ~ Peter S. Beagle

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. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Tarantulas have also received a lot of
bad press in the movies. Many movies
and television programs starring such
noted actors as Sean Connery, The
Three Stooges, Harrison Ford, and
William Shatner, have featured tarantulas
as dangerous to humans or menaces to
civilization. The Tarantula That Ate Tokyo
is a long-standing joke among horrormovie buffs. The fact is that these
movies play with the ignorance and fears
passed on for generations by unenlightened people. Nobody would pay to see
the movie The Beagle That Ate Boston
since everybody knows what a beagle
really is. Few know tarantulas as well. ~ Stanley A Schultz

He knew something of sorrow, remembered joy, and devoutly hoped--as much as he consciously hoped for anything other than proper allotments of sunshine and rainfall--never again to encounter either of those two old annoyances. ~ Peter S. Beagle

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

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. ~ Peter S. Beagle

No, my friend," he responded finally. "I am not God, no more than you. But I think you and I are equally part of God as we stand here," and he swept his arm wide to take in all the slow, dark shiver of the sea as it breathed under the blue and silver morning. "Surely we two are not merely surrounded by this divine splendor - we both belong to it, we are of it, now and for always. How else should it be? ~ Peter S. Beagle

and even the feral, near-wild Third Cat, whose true name he had never discovered, as one has to do with cats, trailed ~ Peter S. Beagle

But still I feel I waste a lot of time leaning on my elbow and thinking to myself, alright sucker, now what? ~ Peter S. Beagle

My dad was a different person when he lectured: his eyes sparkled, his lips turned upward ... 'Think what it must have been like for Darwin, two hundred years ago. He took that voyage on the Beagle [1831] expecting to document the natural world and he stumbled across something impossible. A creature who could defy the laws of physics
straight out of the pages of mythology ... In that one moment, the entire landscape of scientific investigation was drastically and irrevocably changed. The impossible became a widespread scientific reality, as omnipresent as gravity and in some cases, nearly as hard to see. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The universe lies to our senses and they lie to us, and how can we ourselves be anything but liars? For myself, I trust neither message nor messenger; neither what I am told, nor what I see. There may be truth somewhere, but it never gets down to me ~ Peter S. Beagle