Peter S. Beagle

Wrote an introduction that appears in most contemporary editions of The Lord of the Rings, and also wrote the screenplay for Ralph Bakshi s film adaptation. The animated adaptation of The Last Unicorn featured two actors from other productions of The Lord of the Rings: Brother Theodore voiced Gollum in "Return of the King, The , and Christopher Lee appeared in Peter Jackson s films.

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.

Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.

The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.

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

Sparrows and cats will live in my shoe,Sooner than I will live with you. Fish will come walking out of the sea,Sooner than you will come back to me.

Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things. ""Who knows? Times change. Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?""No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns.

There is an old saying that there is no country as unhappy as one that need heroes. "(King Pelles the Sure),I think that love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time, and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last. . . . 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.

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.

The last unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.

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.

You think this is living? This is eating, nothing else.

There are no happy endings, he knew, because nothing ends; and if there were any being dispensed, a great many worthier people would be in line for them long before Michael and Laura and himself. But the happiness of the unworthy and the happiness of the so-so is as fragile and self-centered and dear as the happiness of the righteous and the worthy; and the happiness of the living is no less short and desperate and forgotten than the joys of the dead.

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.

I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they saw them. But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else-what do they look like to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?,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. . . .

And at last she woke up in the middle of one warm night and said, "Yes, but now.

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.

I’m a magician with no magic, and that’s no one at all.

Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The air was motionless, carved, a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth, molded while soft to fit every house and every human being on the earth, and now hardened forever so that no man could move and no air ever came through. The earth rumbled down its alley like a golden bowling ball, shining.

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.

Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal.

. . 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.

From that first moment of doubt, there was no peace for her; from the time she first imagined leaving her forest, she could not stand in one place without wanting to be somewhere else. She trotted up and down beside her pool, restless and unhappy. Unicorns are not meant to make choices. She said no, and yes, and no again, day and night, and for the first time she began to feel the minutes crawling over her like worms.

I am what I am. I would tell you what you want to know if I could, for you have been kind to me. But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.

The Lady Amalthea beckoned, and the cat wriggled all over, like a dog, but he would not come near. . . She was offering her open palm to the crook-eared cat, but he stayed where he was, shivering with the desire to go to her". . . [later, Molly asked the cat] "Why were you afraid to let her touch you? I saw you. You were afraid of her. ""If she had touched me," he said very softly, "I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me but I could not let her. No cat will. . . The price is more than a cat can pay.

She came very close, and looking into my eyes, she said, “My Jenny,” and then she bent her head and kissed me—here, on the left-hand corner of my mouth. And nobody knows better than I that I couldn’t have felt anything, because Tamsin was a ghost—but nobody but me knows what I felt. And I’ll always know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last.

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.

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 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. .