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.
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?
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)
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
It’s not you worries me. The king is a good man, and an old friend, but it has been a long time, and kings change. Even more than other people, kings change.
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.
But some, a very come to the gods all on their own They find their way—long and far it is, sometimes—and they wander up to the altars, shy and clumsy and embarrassed and alone, and when they can get the words out, they say, ‘Well. Here I am
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.
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.
And at last she woke up in the middle of one warm night and said, “Yes, but now.
I’m a magician with no magic, and that’s no one at all.
Ravens bring things to people. We’re like that. It’s our nature. We don’t like it.
Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.
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.
I will kill you if you set me free,’ the eyes said. ‘Set me free.
There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous.
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.
The woman I loved died because I did not love her enough – what greater sin is there than that?”(Uncle Chaim and Aunt Fifke and the Angel)
You’re in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no.
Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.
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.
So you’re an angel, fine, that’s terrific. Now give me back my shadows. (Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel)
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.
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.
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.
He is a true hero,” she said, “a dragonslayer, a giantkiller, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he’s a good man as well. They aren’t always.
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.