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

by T.H. White

Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live, just as it would be easy to join those five dots into a W if you were allowed to look at them forwards, instead of backwards and inside out.

But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight.”

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.

“For this once,” said a large and solemn tench beside his ear, “I will come. But in future you will have to go by yourself. Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”

“Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution. Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same. There is only power. Power is of the individual mind, but the mind’s power is not enough. Power of the body decides everything in the end, and only Might is Right.

Life is blood, shed and offered.

Being reduced to touch and sound, he found himself in better sympathy with these, and could go quietly and quick.

EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY

There were no words for happiness, for freedom, for liking, nor were there any words for their opposites. He felt like a dumb man trying to shout “Fire!” The nearest he could get to Right or Wrong, even, was to say Done or Not Done.

This reminds me of 1984...

Their life was not questionable: it was dictated.

“Only fools want to be great.”

I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.”

“The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide.

“Might is not Right. But there is a lot of Might knocking about in this world, and something has to be done about it.

People will do the basest things on account of their so-called honour.

It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.

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.

Looking back at his life, it seemed to him that he had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which, whenever he had checked it, had broken through at a new place, setting him his work to do again.

impersonality of Justice.

We cannot build the future by avenging the past. Let us sit down as brothers, and accept the Peace of God.