Peter S. Beagle Quotes

Dandyism is a lie which reveals the truth, and the truth is that we are what we pretend to be.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

We'd all like to be taken for what we'd like to be.

I am just a dreamer, but you are just a dream

Every one turns his dreams into realities as far as he can; man is cold as ice to the truth, hot as fire to falsehood.

If they [the dead] should speak, it would be found that in matters of opinion no departed person was exactly what he had passed for in life. They would realise, deep down, that they, and whole nations along with them, are not really what they seem to be-and never can be.

One goes on with the blithe belief that who you really are is transparent to everybody. Then you realise, with some horror, that in fact it's not. So all you can do is keep muddying the waters a bit.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.

I'm nothing more than what you actually see, but I am also the complete opposite.

You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.

You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don't necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction.

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

It's very rare that people are exactly who they appear to be.

People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.

What people think when they see me on TV is that they're experiencing me but they're not.

Man is what his dreams are.

Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true.

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?

Ugly ducklings don't turn into swans and glide off down the lake. Whether your sunglasses are on or off, you only see the world you make.

Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. . .

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.