I hate selkie stories. They’re always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said “What’s this?“, and you never saw your mom again.
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?
It’s not much of a job, but I’ve had worse, and I’ll have better one day. This is not the end.” But.
But she knew beyond both hope and vanity that men had changed, and the world with them, because the unicorns were gone.
Oh, it’s a beautiful day, it’s an elegant, graceful day, and I’m sailing down the Strip in glamorous Las Vegas, on my motor scooter, in company with a certified illegal prostitute who loves poetry and remembers it. Sonofabitch, I’m a real writer! I used to worry about it, but no more. Life is good.
She stood very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy was too great for her body to understand.
What kind of woman is it who believes – who knows, for I saw her face – that she can cure wounds with a touch, and who weeps without tears?” Molly.
Rhinoceri are not questing beasts, but young girls are.
Schmendrick smiled then. “I’m no man,” he said. “I’m a magician with no magic, and that’s no one at all.
Their faces were as beautiful as though they had never known fear.
The unicorn was so startled and so happy to hear her name spoken at last that she overlooked the remark about the horse. “Oh, you know me!” she cried, and the breath of her delight blew the butterfly twenty feet away.
The unicorn waited, feeling the days of her life falling around her with the rain.
You have all the power you need, if you dare to look for it.
Christ, that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again.
Not all the magic in the world can help her now. If she will not fight him, she must go into the sea with the others. Neither magic nor murder will help her.
But no hero can stand before her, no god can wrestle her down, no magic can keep her out – or in, for she’s no prisoner of ours. Even while we exhibit her here, she is walking among you, touching and taking. For Elli is Old Age.
It’s not enough to be ready to see – you have to be looking all the time.
Young people in general sense the difference between the real and the phony. They don’t know it – when they begin to know that difference, and to try to articulate it, then they are adults and subject to all the pains and fallibilities of that state. They can be misled by fools or madmen, but they sense the preacher who doesn’t feel a word of his sermon, the mountebank who is putting them on, the society that does not believe itself. They rarely take a phony of any sort to their hearts.
Tamsin laughed that spring-rain laugh of hers. “Alas, my poor Jenny – awash in hobgoblins, besieged by bogles. Truly, there are no such creatures in your New York?” “Only in junior high school,” I said. “Never mind. Just introduce me as they come along.
How can anything that is going to die be real?
You are the king of a wasted land where there has never been any king but fear. Your true task has just begun, and you may not know in your life if you have succeeded in it, but only if you fail.