Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.
Real magic can never be made by offering someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.
It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is.
Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.
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.
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 magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.
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.
Take me with you. For laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you.
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?
There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous.
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.
Don’t look back and don’t run. You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.
But I’m always dreaming, even when I’m awake; it is never finished.
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.
I love whom I love.
Outside, the night lay coiled in the street, cobra-cold and scaled with stars.
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.
Any woman can weep without tears,” she answered over her shoulder, “and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that’s riddle enough.
We don’t steal from the rich and give to the poor. We steal from the poor because they can’t fight back – most of them – and the rich take from us because they could wipe us out in a day.