It's not you worry 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.

— Peter S. Beagle

I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You don't understand. Never mind.

— Peter S. Beagle

I will kill you if you set me free,' the eyes said. 'Set me free.

— Peter S. Beagle

I will miss it so,” she said beside him. “This hell of a place, I will miss it so much. This fat body, walking mud puddle, deceived by everything, this impossible, ruinous accident of a world, these people who would truly rather hurt one another than eat—oh, there is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do to stay here ten minutes longer. Oh, I will leave claw marks, I will drag mountains and forests away under my fingernails when I am dragged off. Such a stupid way to feel. I will be all dirty from clutching at this stupid planet, and the gods will laugh at me.

— Peter S. Beagle

I wish something would happen to me, something that would show me exactly how cruel and jealous and vengeful I can be. Then I could go back to gentleness because I chose it over brutality for its own sake, not because I didn't have the courage to be cruel. I might even like cruelty. I doubt very much that I would, but I ought to find out.

— Peter S. Beagle

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.

— Peter S. Beagle

Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.

— Peter S. Beagle

Man searches constantly for identity, he thought as he trotted along the gravel path. He has no real proof of this existence except for the reaction of other people to that fact. So he listens very closely to what people say to one another about him, whether it's good or bad, because it indicates that he lives in the same world they do, and that all his fears about being invisible, impotent, lacking some mysterious dimension that other people have, are groundless.

— Peter S. Beagle

Marveling at his own boldness, he said softly, "I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.

— Peter S. Beagle

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.

— Peter S. Beagle