I love you,” Laura said hopelessly. “I’d love you if you were afraid of everything in the world.
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?
Hell of an ornithologist you’d make.
All right, all right for you, you pretentious kneecap! How would you like a punch in the eye?
I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.
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.
You pile of stones, you waste, you desolation, I’ll stuff you with misery till it comes out of your eyes. I’ll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep. I’ll turn you into a bad poet with dreams.
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?
Heroes know that things must happen when it is time for them to happen. A quest may not simply be abandoned; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever; a happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.
We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.
The last unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
The most professional curse ever snarled or croaked or thundered can have no effect on a pure heart.
I know how to live here, I know how everything smells, and tastes, and is. What could I ever search for in the world, except this again?
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.
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.
When I was very young every grownup was a hero. It’s been all downhill since then, and I have only two left.
They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last – these people who know that nothing lasts.
How’s the Angel of Death supposed to do his job with clipped wings?
What use is magic if it can’t save a unicorn?
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.