"I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full."

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."

"Death takes what man would keep and leaves what man would lose"

"Farewell. I hope you hear many more songs."

"What is plucked will grow again,
What is slain lives on,
What is stolen will remain--
What is gone is gone."

"We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream."

"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?"

"And all for nothing," he said. "I cannot touch her, whatever I do."

"I always say perserverance is nine-tenths of any art--not that it's much help to be nine-tenths an artist, of course."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"That is most of it, being a wizard--seeing and listening. The rest is technique."

"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."

"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."

"I think I understand, but I'm sure I don't"

"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."

"...you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact."

"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.

"Wizards make no difference, so they say that nothing does."

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."

"That is true. You are a man, and men can do nothing that makes any difference."

"Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed."

"Who has choices need not choose.
We must, who have none.
We can love but what we lose--
What is gone is gone."