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

by T.H. White

He always understood immediately what was wrong, and generally he could put it right. It was nice for the dogs to have their god with them, in visible form.

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.

The situation became divorced from common sense, so that atrocity stories were accepted by the atrocious people.

This hits a little too close to current events.

They fought him with as much unscrupulousness and hatred as if he had been an antichrist, and they truly believed themselves to be defending the right. It became a civil war of ideologies.

Little has changed, has it?

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

Poignant because it's so, so true.

Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty.

Indeed.

It is generally the trustful and optimistic people who can afford to retreat. The loveless and faithless ones are compelled by their pessimism to attack.

I can't disagree.

Elaine recognized Lancelot in two heartbeats. The first beat was a rising one which faltered at the top. The second one caught up with it, picked its momentum from the crest of the wave, and both came down together like a rearing horse that falls.

I just love the prose.

She was now to welcome, as she knew well, the people who were to break her heart.

Then Guenever would begin the laughing—while always one part of her looked out from the eye windows, and hated the noise which she was making—and the tears would come after the laughter, and she would weep with all her heart.

“I have you for good now,” she said radiantly. “Elaine,” he said, “I want to talk to you.”

Ugh. This was the great tragedy.

“And ever,” says Malory, “Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten.”