Peter S. Beagle Quotes

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

The words 'fairy tales' must accordingly be taken to include tales in which occurs something 'fairy,' something extraordinary - fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals.

[The child] takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.

The imaginary is what tends to become real.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

If swans weren't real myths'd make up.

If a person continues to see giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.

Babies do not want to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles.

You ride astride the imaginary in order to hunt down the real.

Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to hime make-believe and true were exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had to make-believe that they had had their dinners.

His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.

Fantasy and reality often overlap.

What do men know? Because they have seen no unicorns for a while does not mean we have all vanished.

You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.

I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense...

Fantasy is only a state of mind that you can employ when existing in a real context.

A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds.

...belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one - probably a child - who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these

It would have been nice to have had unicorns.