I am no king, and I am no lord,And I am no soldier at-arms,” said he.”I’m none but a harper, and a very poor harper,That am come hither to wed with ye.””If you were a...

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.

song of elli (old age)”What is plucked will grow again,What is slain lives on,What is stolen will remainWhat is gone is gone…What is sea-born dies on land,Soft is trod upon.What is given burns the hand...

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.

Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal.

Sing to me,” she said. “That would be valiant, to raise your voice in this dark, lonely place, and it will be useful as well. Sing to me, sing loudly-drown out my dreams, keep me...

Unicorns are immortal. It is their nature to live alone in one place: usually a forest where there is a pool clear enough for them to see themselves-for they are a little vain, knowing themselves...

The Blue Jay’s Lullaby—Spiders and sowbugs and beetles and crickets, Slugs from the roses and ticks from the thickets, Grasshoppers, snails, and a quail’s egg or two— All to be regurgitated for you.Lullaby, lullaby, swindles and...

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...

There are no happy endings, he knew, because nothing ends; and if there were any being dispensed, a great many worthier people would be in line for them long before Michael and Laura and himself....

I like being brave well enough, but I will be a lazy coward again if you think that would be better.

They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last – these people who know that nothing lasts.

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 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...

The last unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.

If she had touched me,” he said very softly, “I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me but I could not let her. No cat...

The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.

We are all ghosts,” Morris Klapper said at last. “We are conceived in a moment of death and born out of ghost wombs, and we play in the streets with other little ghosts, chanting ghost-rhymes...

The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door.

Alarm clocks were going off in the city now. One after another, sometimes two or three together, they drove their small silver knives into the body of the great dream that sprawled naked on the...

When I was a young man and very well thought of,I couldn’t ask aught that the ladies denied.I nibbled their hearts like a handful of raisins,And I never spoke love but I knew that I...

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.

After the third [San Miguel], I am likely to announce that all writing is fantasy anyway: that to set any event down in print is immediately to begin to lie about it, thank goodness; and...

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.

Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.

I love you, more, I think, than I know, but our kind of love isn’t a sword. It’s a light. Not a fire. A small light, just bright enough to read love letters by and...

Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.

The stars were going out now, one by one, dropping like pennies behind the television aerials and the skylights and the washing strung between the chimneys. The sky was still dark – a sated, navy-blue...

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

…and it’s not my place to chase around after you, fixing stuff. What I know’s what I know, and it don’t include putting the world back the way it out to be. It’s too late...

You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention. […] Never run. […] Walk slowly, and pretend to be thinking of something else. Sing a song, say a poem, do your tricks, but...

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...

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.

Ravens bring things to people. We’re like that. It’s our nature. We don’t like it.

Under the moon, the road that ran from the edge of her forest gleamed like water, but when she stepped out onto it, away from the trees, she felt how hard it was, and how...

There is an old saying that there is no country as unhappy as one that need heroes.”(King Pelles the Sure)

He knew very well that the great majority of human conversation is meaningless. A man can get through most of his days on stock answers to stock questions, he thought. Once he catches onto the...

From that first moment of doubt, there was no peace for her; from the time she first imagined leaving her forest, she could not stand in one place without wanting to be somewhere else. She...

Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.

When I was alive, I believed — as you do — that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said ‘one o’clock’ as though I could see...

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.

The air was motionless, carved, a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth, molded while soft to fit every house and every human being on the earth, and now hardened forever so that...

I think that 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...

Because that world’s gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can’t make that other one real again. It’s like dinosaurs. We can put them back...

My Jenny,” and then she bent her head and kissed me—here, on the left-hand corner of my mouth. And nobody knows better than I that I couldn’t have felt anything, because Tamsin was a ghost—but...

Unicorns know naught of shame, or need, or doubt, or debt;But mortals, as you may have noticed, take what they can get.

Envy nobody. It is the true secret of happiness, or at least the only one I know. (By Moonlight)

There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous.

So you’re an angel, fine, that’s terrific. Now give me back my shadows. (Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel)

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. Unfortunately, it seems to be working backward at the...