I’ll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, ‘The soul selects her own society.’ I used...

But what’s left on earth that I haven’t tried?” Prince Lír demanded. “I have swum four rivers, each in full flood and none less than a mile wide. I have climbed seven mountains never before...

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.