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

by T.H. White

If you know what is going to happen to people, and not what has happened to them, it makes it difficult to prevent it happening, if you don’t want it to have happened, if you see what I mean? Like drawing in a mirror.”

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something.

The noise, the slaughtering and slaughtered demons black against the flames—what scenes there have been in Sherwood, where now the oak trees crowd into a shade!

As for the Latin, it was talked at such a speed that the rafters rang with genitive plurals—and there was such a prelatical issuing of admonitions, exhortations and benedictions that it was a wonder the whole congregation did not go to heaven on the spot.

Apart from their helmets and encumbrances and the difficulty of breathing, they had to be dressed in their suits by kind and careful assistants. They had to rely on these assistants to do it properly. A diver puts his life in the hands of the ratings who are dressing him. These young men, like pages or squires, mother him with great tenderness and concentration and with a sort of protective respect. They always address him by his title, not by his name. They say, “Sit down, diver,” or “Now the left foot, diver,” or “Diver Two, can you hear me on the inter-com?” It is good to put your life in other people’s hands.

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

The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy—this discovery is not a matter for triumph. The baby, perhaps, cries out triumphantly: I have balance! But the seventh sense is recognized without a cry. We only carry on with our famous knowledge of the world, riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a stage of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do.

“I knelt down in the water of Mortoise, Jenny, where he had knocked me—and I thanked God for the adventure.”

“I was on my way to obey a call to the land of Hungary when I drew this window because it pleased me best of all windows.”

Do you think that they, with their Battles, Famine, Black Death and Serfdom, were less enlightened than we are, with our Wars, Blockade, Influenza and Conscription? Even if they were foolish enough to believe that the earth was the centre of the universe, do we not ourselves believe that man is the fine flower of creation? If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has Man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?

Outside, the siege works were spread below. Some tiny soldiers in the enemy camp were merrily playing Fox-and-Geese on a frozen pond. Their clear laughter came up, separated by distance from the tumbles which gave it rise.

It was as if everything would lead to sorrow, so long as man refused to forget the past. The wrongs of Uther and of Cain were wrongs which could have been righted only by the blessing of forgetting them.

More accurately: forgiving

The imaginary lines on the earth’s surface only needed to be unimagined. The airborne birds skipped them by nature. How mad the frontiers had seemed to Lyo-lyok, and would to Man if he could learn to fly.