“Now I will believe that there are unicorns…”
— William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”
“But is the unicorn a falsehood? It’s the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters’ snares.”
-Umberto Eco, “The Name of the Rose”
“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.”
— Lewis Carroll, “Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There”
“Stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows.”
— William Faulkner, “Soldiers’ Pay”
“All the beasts obeyed Noah when he admitted them into the ark. All but the Unicorn. Confident of his own abilities, he boasted, ‘I shall swim.’”
— Ukranian folktale
“A wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.”
– Tibetan proverb
“The unicorn was white, with hoofs of silver and graceful horn of pearl….The glorious thing about him was his eye. There was a faint bluish furrow down each side of his nose, and this led to the eye sockets, and surrounded them in a pensive shade. The eyes, circled by this sad and beautiful darkness, were so sorrowful, lonely, gentle and nobly tragic, that they killed all other emotions except love.”
-T. H. White, “The Once and Future King”
“Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
“The unicorns were the most recognizable magic the fairies possessed, and they sent them to those worlds where belief in the magic was in danger of falling altogether. After all, there has to be some belief in magic — however small — for any world to survive.”
— Terry Brooks, “The Black Unicorn”
“The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.”
— Peter S. Beagle, “The Last Unicorn”
