The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

by T.H. White

He was one of those people who would be neither a follower nor a leader, but only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it.

Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”

they do not really understand that they are prisoners, any more than the cavalry officers do.

on the highest tower of all a carrion crow was sitting, with an arrow in its beak.

SMELL IS NOT ENOUGH.

Patriotism is not enough

The extraordinary thing was that he could not ask these questions. In order to ask them, he would have had to put them into ant language through his antennae—and he now discovered, with a helpless feeling, that there were no words for the things he wanted to say. There were no words for happiness, for freedom, for liking, nor were there any words for their opposites.

The nearest he could get to Right or Wrong, even, was to say Done or Not Done.

“I dew think our beloved Leader is wonderful, don’t yew? They sigh she was stung three hundred times in the last war, and was awarded the Ant Cross for Valour.”

Mammy—mammy—mammy gave place to Antland, Antland Over All,

“Only fools want to be great.”

“Whoso Pulleth Out This Sword of this Stone and Anvil, is Rightwise King Born of All England.”

Arthur was a young man, just on the threshold of life. He had fair hair and a stupid face, or at any rate there was a lack of cunning in it.

It was an open face, with kind eyes and a reliable or faithful expression, as though he were a good learner who enjoyed being alive and did not believe in original sin. He had never been unjustly treated, for one thing, so he was kind to other people.

“That’s the spirit,” he said, putting his arm through the King’s and smiling cheerfully. “That’s more like it. Stand up for yourself, that’s the ticket. Asking advice is the fatal thing. Besides, I won’t be here to advise you, fairly soon.”

The boy thought that there was something wrong with him. All through his life—even when he was a great man with the world at his feet—he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand.

People have odd reasons for ending up as saints.

They kneeled between the frescoed walls, where some important-looking saints with blue haloes were standing on tiptoe to avoid foreshortening,

There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops.

You can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically—she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. And then, when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living—not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth—if women ever do hope this—but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one—knowledge of the world.

But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not.

The bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically balancing along toward the inevitable grave,

“Can’t you understand wanting to be good at things? No, I can see that you would not have to. It is only people who are lacking, or bad, or inferior, who have to be good at things.

May God presairve me from the Holy Grail, whatever.”

One explanation of Guenever, for what it is worth, is that she was what they used to call a “real” person. She was not the kind who can be fitted away safely under some label or other, as “loyal” or “disloyal” or “self-sacrificing” or “jealous.” Sometimes she was loyal and sometimes she was disloyal. She behaved like herself.

It is difficult to write about a real person.

Generosity is the eighth deadly sin.

What Arthur had feared from the start of the Grail Quest had come to pass. If you achieve perfection, you die.

Mordred wore his ridiculous shoes contemptuously: they were a satire on himself. The court was modern.

Instead of being a foppish man with a crooked shoulder, dressed in extravagant clothes, he became a Cause.

Lovers were not recruited then among the juveniles and adolescents: they were seasoned people, who knew what they were about. In those days people loved each other for their lives, without the conveniences of the divorce court and the psychiatrist. They had a God in heaven and a goddess on earth—and, since people who devote themselves to goddesses must exercise some caution about the ones to whom they are devoted, they neither chose them by the passing standards of the flesh alone, nor abandoned it lightly when the bruckle thing began to fail.

“You will find,” he explained, “that when the kings are bullies who believe in force, the people are bullies too. If I don’t stand for law, I won’t have law among my people.

Arthur, who had come pattering through the stone corridors of his palace with a mind fixed on the work in front of him, stood waiting in the doorway without surprise. The men of the chevron and thistle, turning to him, saw the old King in the last minute of his glory. They stood for a few heartbeats silent, and Gareth, in a pain of recognition, saw him as he was. He did not see a hero of romance, but a plain man who had done his best—not a leader of chivalry, but the pupil who had tried to be faithful to his curious master, the magician, by thinking all the time—not Arthur of England, but a lonely old gentleman who had worn his crown for half a lifetime in the teeth of fate.

In the last resort it is usually the richest person who wins, whether he hires the most expensive arguer or the most expensive fighter, so it is no good pretending that this is simply a matter of brute force.

She looked singularly lovely, not like a film star, but like a woman who had grown a soul.

“So far as I can understand the story, Mordred, Agravaine went with thirteen other knights, fully armed, and tried to kill Lancelot when he had nothing but his dressing-gown. The upshot was that Agravaine himself was killed, together with all thirteen of the knights—except one, who ran away.” “I did not run away.” “Ye survivit, Mordred.”

“I wish I had never been born.” “So do I, my poor boy. But you are born, so now we must do the best we can.”

He was acting, and had ceased to be real.

What does it matter if Antony did fall upon his sword? It only killed him. It is the mother’s not the lover’s lust that rots the mind. It is that which condemns the tragic character to his walking death.

He had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such thing as original sin.

He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state.

Man must be ready to say: Yes, since Cain there has been injustice, but we can only set the misery right if we accept a status quo. Lands have been robbed, men slain, nations humiliated. Let us now start fresh without remembrance, rather than live forward and backward at the same time. We cannot build the future by avenging the past. Let us sit down as brothers, and accept the Peace of God.

“Thomas, my idea of those knights was a sort of candle, like these ones here. I have carried it for many years with a hand to shield it from the wind. It has flickered often.