Stardust

it was a deceptive blankness, the blankness of a rock face that one only realizes cannot be climbed when one is halfway up, and there is no longer any way down

“How d’you like your baths?” she asked, solicitously, “warm, hot, or boil-a-lobster?”

“You are young, and in love,” said Primus. “Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.”

“I am the most miserable person who ever lived,” he said to the Lord Primus, when they stopped to feed the horses feedbags of damp oats.
“You are young, and in love,” said Primus. “Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.”

(Fairy Tales, as G.K. Chesterton once pointed out, are not true. They are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)

The usual. Cat’s breath and fish-scales and moonlight on a mill-pond, melted and smithied and forged by the dwarfs. You’ll be needin’ it to bring your star back with you.”

“A man could walk, only stopping to sleep, while the moon waxed and waned above him a half a dozen times, crossing treacherous mountains and burning deserts, before he reached the place where the star has fallen.”

And Tristran Thorn in crimson and canary was not the same man that Tristran Thorn in his overcoat and Sunday suit had been

The pale trees shook, although no wind blew, and it seemed to Tristran that they shook in anger

every lover is in his heart a madman, and in his head a minstrel