ren’s Reviews > The Last Unicorn > Status Update

"Supple as fire, he turned where there was no room to turn and met them again, his muzzle almost touching the ground, his neck swelling like a wave.
They fled and he followed: not as swiftly as he had charged, but quickly enough to keep each one alone, friendless in the wild dark. The ground tore under their feet, and they cried out, but they could not even hear themselves."

"Molly saw the horns first. The light made her cover her face, but the pale horns struck bitterly through hands and eyelids to the back of her mind. She saw Prince Lír and Lady Amalthea standing before the horns, while the fire flourished on the walls of the cavern and soared up into the roofless dark. Lír had drawn his sword, but it blazed up in his hand, and he let it fall, and it broke like ice."

"'That's right. Nothing but magic matters to me. I would round up unicorns for Haggard myself if it would heighten my power by half a hair. It's true. I have no preferences and no loyalties. I have only magic.' His voice was hard and sad.
'Really?' she asked, rocking dreamily in her terror, watching the brightness flowing by. 'Are you really like that?'
'No,' he said, then or later. 'No, it's not true.'"

"The light and the smell had become a sticky sea in which she floundered like the unicorns, hopeless and eternal. The path was beginning to tilt downward, into the deepening light; and far ahead Prince Lír and the Lady Amalthea went marching along to disaster as calmly as candles burning down."

"'But you made him do it. You know that all he wants in the world is to have her give up her quests and stay with him. And he would have done it, but you reminded him that he is a hero, and now he has to do what heroes do. He loves her, and you tricked him.'
'I never,' Schmendrick said. 'Be quiet, he'll hear you.' Molly felt herself growing light-headed, silly with the nearness of the bull."

"Pale as lime, the brightness was rising in the cavern. They could see one another clearly now, each gone tallowy and strange with fear. Even the beauty of the Lady Amalthea drained away under that dull, hungry light. She looked more mortal than any of the other three.
Molly Grue stayed close to the magician, taking his hand as she had been used to touch the unicorn when she was lonely."

"I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling. I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you. Also to find some way of starting a conversation.' But the Lady Amalthea spoke no word to him."

"...Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."

"I am a hero. It is a trade, no more like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts... But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things..."

"At the same moment, Prince Lír said, 'No.'
The word escaped him as suddenly as a sneeze, emerging in a questioning squeak--the voice of a silly young man mortally embarrassed by a rich and terrible gift. 'No,' he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king's voice: not Haggard, but a king whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give."