He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. A terrible light poured from him like sweat, and his roar started landslides flowing into one another. His horns were pale as scars.
The sight of men filled her with an old, slow, strange mixture of tenderness and terror.
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.
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.
And at last she woke up in the middle of one warm night and said, “Yes, but now.
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.
The secret of my long life is that nothing has ever been dull for me. For all my life I have been interested in everything I saw and been anxious to see more. But I cannot stand to be bored, and I will not go to parties at which I expect to be bored, especially if they are my own. Therefore, to my next ball I shall invite one guest I am sure no one, not even myself, could possibly find boring. My friends, the guest of honor at my next party shall be Death himself.
Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.” A.
Always, always,” it sighed, “faithfulness 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.
This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?
I am a king’s daughter, And if I cared to care, The moon that has no mistress Would flutter in my hair.
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.
So let’s say you marry this girl. All right, you can still be a great man. Look at all the great men who had wives. Go ahead, be a great man, don’t let me stop you. Only first you should stop by the grocer and pick up something for the dog. Also for the baby, soft, because he’s getting his teeth. To do this, you have to have a job five days a week, you can be a great man on week ends.
What I forget not only ceases to exist, but never really existed in the first place.
But another sound followed them long after these had faded, followed them into morning on a strange road – the tiny, dry sound of a spider weeping.
Where you are going now,′ Schmendrick answered, ‘few will mean you anything but evil, and a friendly heart – however foolish – may be as welcome as water one day. Take me with you, for laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you.
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?
You think this is living? This is eating, nothing else.
The universe and Claudio Bianchi had agreed long ago to leave one another alone, and he was grateful, knowing very well how rare such a bargain is, and how rarely kept. And if he had any complaints, he made sure that neither the universe nor he himself ever knew of them.
You deserve the services of a great wizard,” he said to the unicorn, “but I’m afraid you’ll have to be glad of the aid of a second-rate pickpocket.