Stardust

by

Neil Gaiman

Tristran Thorn Character Analysis

The protagonist of the novel, Tristran is a 17-year-old boy whose mother, unbeknownst to him, is a young woman from Faerie. Tristran, however, grows up in the English village of Wall with his father Dunstan, and he believes his mother is Daisy. Tristran never fully fits in in Wall, though like most young men there, he develops a crush on Victoria Forester. When she promises him anything he wants if he brings her back a star she saw fall in Faerie, Tristran embarks on a journey through Faerie. During this journey, Tristran comes of age and learns important lessons about respect and ownership. Though he initially binds the star, Yvaine, to him with a silver chain, he eventually comes to understand that it’s wholly inappropriate to own and control someone in that way—and over the course of his journey, he and Yvaine fall in love. He decides to marry Yvaine instead of Victoria when he finally returns to Wall, deciding also to stay in Faerie for good. Tristran also learns that because his mother is Lady Una, he’s the rightful heir to Stormhold. He rules for centuries with Yvaine at his side, and she succeeds him as the Lady of Stormhold following his death.

Tristran Thorn Quotes in Stardust

The Stardust quotes below are all either spoken by Tristran Thorn or refer to Tristran Thorn. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Youth, Aging, and Maturity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1  Quotes

Mr. Bromios had set up a wine-tent and was selling wines and pasties to the village folk, who were often tempted by the foods being sold by the folk from Beyond the Wall but had been told by their grandparents, who had got it from their grandparents, that it was deeply, utterly wrong to eat fairy food, to eat fairy fruit, to drink fairy water and sip fairy wine.

For every nine years, the folk from Beyond the Wall and over the hill set up the stalls, and for a day and a night the meadow played host to the Faerie market; and there was, for one day and one night in nine years, commerce between the nations.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, Dunstan Thorn, The Little Hairy Man
Page Number: 17
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

“For a kiss, and the pledge of your hand,” said Tristran, grandiloquently, “I would bring you that fallen star.”

He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester, Mr. Monday
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

He thought of Victoria’s lips, and her grey eyes, and the sound of her laughter. He straightened his shoulders, placed the crystal snowdrop in the top buttonhole of his coat, now undone. And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristran Thorn passed beyond the fields we know...

...and into Faerie.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester, Dunstan Thorn, Mr. Monday
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

“So what damn-fool silly thing has this young lady got you a-doin’ of?”

Tristran put down his wooden cup of tea, and stood up, offended.

“What, he asked, in what he was certain were lofty and scornful tones, “would possibly make you imagine that my lady-love would have sent me on some foolish errand?”

The little man stared at up at him with eyes like beads of jet. “Because that’s the only reason a lad like you would be stupid enough to cross the border into Faerie. The only ones who ever come here from your lands are the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad. And you don’t look like much of a minstrel, and you’re—pardon me saying so, lad, but it’s true—ordinary as cheese-crumbs. So it’s love, if you ask me.”

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Little Hairy Man (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester
Page Number: 78
Explanation and Analysis:

They certainly were fine new clothes. While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe. And Tristran Thorn in Crimson and canary was not the same man that Tristran Thorn in his overcoat and Sunday suit had been. There was a swagger to his steps, a jauntiness to his movements, that had not been there before. His chin went up instead of down, and there was a glint in his eye that he had not possessed when he had worn a bowler hat.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, The Little Hairy Man
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

“And this wise, sweet creature sent you here to torture me?” she said.

“Well, not exactly. You see, she promised me anything I desired—be it her hand in marriage or her lips to kiss—were I to bring her the star that we saw fall the night before last. I had thought,” he confessed, “that a fallen star would probably look like a diamond or a rock. I certainly wasn’t expecting a lady.”

“So, having found a lady, could you not have come to her aid, or left her alone? Why drag her into your foolishness?”

“Love,” he explained.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Star/Yvaine (speaker), Victoria Forester
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:

“Hullo,” said Tristran. There were burrs and leaves in the lion’s mane. He held the heavy crown out toward the great beast. “You won. let the unicorn go.” And he took a step closer. Then he reached out both trembling hands and placed the crown upon the lion’s head.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, The Unicorn, Mrs. Cherry
Related Symbols: Candle and Crown
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:

Inside, he felt numbed and foolish, stung by a pang of guilt and shame and regret. He should not have loosed her chain, he should have tied it to a tree; he should have forced the star to go with him into the village. This went through his head as he walked; but another voice spoke to him also, pointing out that if he had not unchained her then, he would have done it sometime soon, and she would have run from him then.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine, The Unicorn
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

“But you were telling me that Pan owned the forest...”

“Of course he does,” said the voice. “It’s not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it’s yours and then be willing to let it go. Pan owns this forest, like that.”

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Tree (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, The Unicorn
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:

“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.”

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), Primus (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Tristran sat at the top of the spire of cloud and wondered why none of the heroes of the penny dreadfuls he used to read so avidly were ever hungry. His stomach rumbled, and his hand hurt him so.

Adventures are all very well in their place, he thought, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, Morwanneg/the Witch-Queen
Page Number: 177-178
Explanation and Analysis:

The exotic bird hopped up beside her and it chirruped, once, curiously.

“Of course I have kept my word—to the letter,” said the old woman, as if in reply. “He shall be transformed back at the market meadow, so shall regain his own form before he comes to Wall. [...] And I do believe that bumpkin’s flower was even finer than the one you lost to me, all those years ago.”

Related Characters: The Old Woman/Madame Semele (speaker), Tristran Thorn, Dunstan Thorn, The Young Woman/the Bird/Lady Una
Page Number: 194-195
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

For he could no longer reconcile his old idea of giving the star to Victoria Forester with his current notion that the star was not a thing to be passed from hand to hand, but a true person in all respects and no kind of a thing at all.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 208
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

And it came to Tristran then, in a wave of something that resembled homesickness, but a homesickness comprised in equal parts of longing and despair, that these might as well be his own people, for he felt he had more in common with them than with the pallid folk of Wall in their worsted jackets and their hobnailed boots.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, Mr. Brown, Wystan Pippin
Page Number: 215
Explanation and Analysis:

“You said you would give me whatever I desire.”

“Yes.”

“Then...” He paused. “Then I desire that you should marry Mister Monday. I desire that you should be married as soon as possible—why, within this very week, if such a thing can be arranged. And I desire that you should be as happy together as ever a man and woman have ever been.”

She exhaled in one low shuddering breath of release. Then she looked at him. “Do you mean it?” she asked.

“Marry him with my blessing, and we’ll be quits and done,” said Tristran. “And the star will probably think so, too.”

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), Victoria Forester (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, Mr. Monday
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:

“What have you done?” Spittle flecked the old woman’s lips.

“I have done nothing; nothing I did not do eighteen years ago. I was bound to you to be your slave until the day that the moon lost her daughter, if it occurred in a week when two Mondays came together. And my time with you is almost done.”

Related Characters: The Old Woman/Madame Semele (speaker), The Young Woman/the Bird/Lady Una (speaker), Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester, Dunstan Thorn, Mr. Monday
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 229
Explanation and Analysis:

“And if it does not suit you, you may leave, you know. There is no silver chain that will be holding you to the throne of Stormhold.”

And Tristran found this quite reassuring. Yvaine was less impressed, for she knew that silver chains come in all shapes and sizes; but she also knew that it would not be wise to begin her life with Tristran by arguing with his mother.

Related Characters: The Young Woman/the Bird/Lady Una (speaker), Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine, The Old Woman/Madame Semele
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 238
Explanation and Analysis:

Yvaine realized that she felt nothing but pity for the creature who had wanted her dead, so she said, “Could it be that the heart that you seek is no longer my own?”

The old woman coughed. Her whole frame shook and spasmed with the retching effort of it.

The star waited for her to be done, and then she said, “I have given my heart to another.”

“The boy? The one in the inn? With the unicorn?”

“Yes.”

“You should have let me take it back then, for my sisters and me. We could have been young again, well into the next age of the world. Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it. They all do.”

Related Characters: The Star/Yvaine (speaker), Morwanneg/the Witch-Queen (speaker), Tristran Thorn, The Unicorn, The Lilim
Page Number: 240-241
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

They say that each night, when the duties of state permit, she climbs, on foot, and limps, alone, to the highest peak of the palace, where she stands for hour after hour, seeming not to notice the cold peak winds. She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine
Page Number: 248
Explanation and Analysis:
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Tristran Thorn Quotes in Stardust

The Stardust quotes below are all either spoken by Tristran Thorn or refer to Tristran Thorn. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Youth, Aging, and Maturity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1  Quotes

Mr. Bromios had set up a wine-tent and was selling wines and pasties to the village folk, who were often tempted by the foods being sold by the folk from Beyond the Wall but had been told by their grandparents, who had got it from their grandparents, that it was deeply, utterly wrong to eat fairy food, to eat fairy fruit, to drink fairy water and sip fairy wine.

For every nine years, the folk from Beyond the Wall and over the hill set up the stalls, and for a day and a night the meadow played host to the Faerie market; and there was, for one day and one night in nine years, commerce between the nations.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, Dunstan Thorn, The Little Hairy Man
Page Number: 17
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

“For a kiss, and the pledge of your hand,” said Tristran, grandiloquently, “I would bring you that fallen star.”

He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester, Mr. Monday
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

He thought of Victoria’s lips, and her grey eyes, and the sound of her laughter. He straightened his shoulders, placed the crystal snowdrop in the top buttonhole of his coat, now undone. And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristran Thorn passed beyond the fields we know...

...and into Faerie.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester, Dunstan Thorn, Mr. Monday
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

“So what damn-fool silly thing has this young lady got you a-doin’ of?”

Tristran put down his wooden cup of tea, and stood up, offended.

“What, he asked, in what he was certain were lofty and scornful tones, “would possibly make you imagine that my lady-love would have sent me on some foolish errand?”

The little man stared at up at him with eyes like beads of jet. “Because that’s the only reason a lad like you would be stupid enough to cross the border into Faerie. The only ones who ever come here from your lands are the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad. And you don’t look like much of a minstrel, and you’re—pardon me saying so, lad, but it’s true—ordinary as cheese-crumbs. So it’s love, if you ask me.”

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Little Hairy Man (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester
Page Number: 78
Explanation and Analysis:

They certainly were fine new clothes. While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe. And Tristran Thorn in Crimson and canary was not the same man that Tristran Thorn in his overcoat and Sunday suit had been. There was a swagger to his steps, a jauntiness to his movements, that had not been there before. His chin went up instead of down, and there was a glint in his eye that he had not possessed when he had worn a bowler hat.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, The Little Hairy Man
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

“And this wise, sweet creature sent you here to torture me?” she said.

“Well, not exactly. You see, she promised me anything I desired—be it her hand in marriage or her lips to kiss—were I to bring her the star that we saw fall the night before last. I had thought,” he confessed, “that a fallen star would probably look like a diamond or a rock. I certainly wasn’t expecting a lady.”

“So, having found a lady, could you not have come to her aid, or left her alone? Why drag her into your foolishness?”

“Love,” he explained.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Star/Yvaine (speaker), Victoria Forester
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:

“Hullo,” said Tristran. There were burrs and leaves in the lion’s mane. He held the heavy crown out toward the great beast. “You won. let the unicorn go.” And he took a step closer. Then he reached out both trembling hands and placed the crown upon the lion’s head.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, The Unicorn, Mrs. Cherry
Related Symbols: Candle and Crown
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:

Inside, he felt numbed and foolish, stung by a pang of guilt and shame and regret. He should not have loosed her chain, he should have tied it to a tree; he should have forced the star to go with him into the village. This went through his head as he walked; but another voice spoke to him also, pointing out that if he had not unchained her then, he would have done it sometime soon, and she would have run from him then.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine, The Unicorn
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

“But you were telling me that Pan owned the forest...”

“Of course he does,” said the voice. “It’s not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it’s yours and then be willing to let it go. Pan owns this forest, like that.”

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Tree (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, The Unicorn
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:

“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.”

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), Primus (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Tristran sat at the top of the spire of cloud and wondered why none of the heroes of the penny dreadfuls he used to read so avidly were ever hungry. His stomach rumbled, and his hand hurt him so.

Adventures are all very well in their place, he thought, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, Morwanneg/the Witch-Queen
Page Number: 177-178
Explanation and Analysis:

The exotic bird hopped up beside her and it chirruped, once, curiously.

“Of course I have kept my word—to the letter,” said the old woman, as if in reply. “He shall be transformed back at the market meadow, so shall regain his own form before he comes to Wall. [...] And I do believe that bumpkin’s flower was even finer than the one you lost to me, all those years ago.”

Related Characters: The Old Woman/Madame Semele (speaker), Tristran Thorn, Dunstan Thorn, The Young Woman/the Bird/Lady Una
Page Number: 194-195
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

For he could no longer reconcile his old idea of giving the star to Victoria Forester with his current notion that the star was not a thing to be passed from hand to hand, but a true person in all respects and no kind of a thing at all.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 208
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

And it came to Tristran then, in a wave of something that resembled homesickness, but a homesickness comprised in equal parts of longing and despair, that these might as well be his own people, for he felt he had more in common with them than with the pallid folk of Wall in their worsted jackets and their hobnailed boots.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, Mr. Brown, Wystan Pippin
Page Number: 215
Explanation and Analysis:

“You said you would give me whatever I desire.”

“Yes.”

“Then...” He paused. “Then I desire that you should marry Mister Monday. I desire that you should be married as soon as possible—why, within this very week, if such a thing can be arranged. And I desire that you should be as happy together as ever a man and woman have ever been.”

She exhaled in one low shuddering breath of release. Then she looked at him. “Do you mean it?” she asked.

“Marry him with my blessing, and we’ll be quits and done,” said Tristran. “And the star will probably think so, too.”

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn (speaker), Victoria Forester (speaker), The Star/Yvaine, Mr. Monday
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:

“What have you done?” Spittle flecked the old woman’s lips.

“I have done nothing; nothing I did not do eighteen years ago. I was bound to you to be your slave until the day that the moon lost her daughter, if it occurred in a week when two Mondays came together. And my time with you is almost done.”

Related Characters: The Old Woman/Madame Semele (speaker), The Young Woman/the Bird/Lady Una (speaker), Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine, Victoria Forester, Dunstan Thorn, Mr. Monday
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 229
Explanation and Analysis:

“And if it does not suit you, you may leave, you know. There is no silver chain that will be holding you to the throne of Stormhold.”

And Tristran found this quite reassuring. Yvaine was less impressed, for she knew that silver chains come in all shapes and sizes; but she also knew that it would not be wise to begin her life with Tristran by arguing with his mother.

Related Characters: The Young Woman/the Bird/Lady Una (speaker), Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine, The Old Woman/Madame Semele
Related Symbols: Silver Chains/the Power of Stormhold
Page Number: 238
Explanation and Analysis:

Yvaine realized that she felt nothing but pity for the creature who had wanted her dead, so she said, “Could it be that the heart that you seek is no longer my own?”

The old woman coughed. Her whole frame shook and spasmed with the retching effort of it.

The star waited for her to be done, and then she said, “I have given my heart to another.”

“The boy? The one in the inn? With the unicorn?”

“Yes.”

“You should have let me take it back then, for my sisters and me. We could have been young again, well into the next age of the world. Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it. They all do.”

Related Characters: The Star/Yvaine (speaker), Morwanneg/the Witch-Queen (speaker), Tristran Thorn, The Unicorn, The Lilim
Page Number: 240-241
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

They say that each night, when the duties of state permit, she climbs, on foot, and limps, alone, to the highest peak of the palace, where she stands for hour after hour, seeming not to notice the cold peak winds. She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.

Related Characters: Tristran Thorn, The Star/Yvaine
Page Number: 248
Explanation and Analysis: