The Last Unicorn
"I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full."
Schmendrick the Magician
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She said, "I will go no farther."
"There is no choice. We can only go on."
The magician said again. "We can only go on."
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"Death takes what man would keep and leaves what man would lose"
The Butterfly
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"Farewell. I hope you hear many more songs."
The Unicorn
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"What is plucked will grow again,
What is slain lives on,
What is stolen will remain--
What is gone is gone."
Old Age
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"We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream."
Schmendrick the Magician
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"I want to serve her, as you do, to help her find whatever she has come here to find. I wish to be whatever she has most need of. Tell her so. Will you tell her so?"
Prince Lir
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"And all for nothing," he said. "I cannot touch her, whatever I do."
Prince Lir
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"I always say perserverance is nine-tenths of any art--not that it's much help to be nine-tenths an artist, of course."
Mabruk the Wizard
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"You are losing my interest and that is very dangerous. In a moment I will have forgotten you quite entirely, and will never be able to remember just what I did with you. What I forget not only ceases to exist, but never really existed in the first place."
King Haggard
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"But I must go on, for it is never finished. Even when I wake, I cannot tell what is real, and what I am dreaming as I move and speak and eat my dinner. I remember what cannot have happened, and forget something that is happening to me now."
Lady Amalthea
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"I suppose I was young when I first saw them. Now I must be old--at least I have picked many more things up than I had then, and put them all down again. But I always knew that nothing was worth the investment of my heart, because nothing lasts, and I was right, and so I was always old. Yet each time I see my unicorns, it is like that morning in the woods, and I am truly young in spite of myself, and anything can happen in a world that holds such beauty."
King Haggard
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"That is most of it, being a wizard--seeing and listening. The rest is technique."
Schmendrick the Magician
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"It's really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space--that's the way life was meant to be. You're supposed to be too late for some things. Don't worry about it."
The Skull
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"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 it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls."
The Skull
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"I think I understand, but I'm sure I don't"
Schmendrick the Magician
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"Everything dies. It is good that everything dies. I want to die when you die. Do not let him enchant me, do not let him make me immortal."
Lady Amalthea
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"...you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact."
Schmendrick the Magician
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"No," he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king's voice...whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give.
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"Wizards make no difference, so they say that nothing does."
Prince Lir
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Lir said, "It is my right. A hero is entitled to his happy ending, when it comes at last." But Schmendrick answered, "This is not the end, either for you or for her."
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"That is true. You are a man, and men can do nothing that makes any difference."
The Unicorn
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"Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed."
Schmendrick the Magician
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"Who has choices need not choose.
We must, who have none.
We can love but what we lose--
What is gone is gone."
Molly Grue
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