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.
When you walk, you make an echo where they used to be.
How terrible to be forgotten by the god that made you, even if you're just a room. How could you love something that could do that anytime?
Her face was a stranger's face, which was as it should be. Love each other from the day we are born to the day we die, we are still strangers every minute, and nobody should forget that, even though we have to.
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 will. We let human beings caress us because it is pleasant enough and calms them - but not her. The price is more than a cat can pay.
Marriage isn't like football, like bocce. One isn't good at it, nobody has a special gift. You stumble along, and if there is enough love--" she smiled at him-- "you learn.
The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door.
The spaciousness of it astounds me; this is the kind of country you dream of running away to when you are very young and innocently hungry, before you learn that all land is owned by somebody, that you can get arrested for swinging through trees in a loincloth, and that you were born either too late or too poor for everything you want to do.
It's whatever we can get, then, she said, on whatever terms we can get it.
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. Before.
I love you," Laura said hopelessly. "I'd love you if you were afraid of everything in the world.
But I'm always dreaming, even when I'm awake; it is never finished.
Some things aren't any good unless they're shared. Sitting up all night would be pointless if somebody you loved wasn't sitting up with you, picking out music to play and helping you kill the bourbon. Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.
I will keep the colour of your eyes until no other in the world remembers your name.
There is only one spot in me that is as warm and placid as those cattle, and that is the part that knows quite surely that I will always be cold, that there will always be a wind hunting through me, and that I will always be hurrying before the coming darkness in search of a place that is not there.
We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.
I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling.
Death takes what man would keep," said the butterfly, "and leaves what man would lose. Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. I warm my hands before the fire of life and get four-way relief.
She loved him too. That's why she let him go.
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.
He wrote a poem about that, about not knowing so many things in a life. The poem was a failure, as far as he was ever concerned; he felt so about most of the poems he wrote during that time. Which was odd, when he thought much about it, because it was a really good time, taken all in all.
As to your first question, no cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them.
I am infected with life and will die of it in time.
I will kill you if you set me free,' the eyes said. 'Set me free.
Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.
How can it be?" she wondered. "I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns (...) But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else — what do they look to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?
I was born mortal, and I have been immortal for a long, foolish time, and one day I will be mortal again; so I know something that a unicorn cannot know. Whatever can die is beautiful—more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world.
I was one of the haves, and one of the secrets of being a have is not wasting your time on empathy.
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.
The most professional curse ever snarled or croaked or thundered can have no effect on a pure heart.
Prodigies began to waken somewhere southwest of his twelfth rib, and he himself- still mirroring the Lady Amalthea- began to shine.
No," she said, answering his eyes. "I can never regret."[...]"I can sorrow," she offered gently, "but it's not the same thing.
Ah. My story. Are you certain you wish to hear it? It is long, unlikely, and remarkably unedifying -- shameful, even, to come from a minister's lips. Blasphemous, too, properly regarded.
This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?
You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.
Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard's castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts...
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.
She leaned forward and put her arms around me. Sometimes it used to make me prickly when she did that, and I'd turn into a bag of knees and elbows. . .
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.
Hell of an ornithologist you'd make.
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 unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.
You must remind me, little one. When I... when I lose myself - when I lose her - you must remind me that I am still searching, still waiting... that I have never forgotten her, never turned from all she taught me. I sit in this place... I sit... because a king has to sit, you see... but in my mind, in my poor mind, I am always away with her....
Haven't you ever been in a fairy tale before?
There is never a happy ending because nothing ever ends.
He had never missed God or the hope of heaven, but he had dearly wanted confession to rest his mind, Communion to let him touch something beyond Father Krone's dry, shaky hand, and holy water to taste like starlight.
Still I have read, or heard it sung, that unicorns when time was young, could tell the difference 'twixt the two—the false shining and the true, the lips' laugh and the heart's rue.
Wisdom is finding joy in bewilderment.
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 woman - but the grass was jittery with the expectation of dawn.
