The Bright Sword Quotes

“He looked up at the empty clouds, and as he died he wondered, not for the first time but for the very last, why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“One day you will see that it is a mistake to love an empire, or a throne, or a crown, because those things cannot love. They can only die.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“What he wanted was to live in a timeless castle, a world wrought of old gold, where everything was noble and glorious and nothing ever changed. He wanted the battle to be over, he wanted to win and have won and be done with fighting forever and ever. But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled one into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends. Till the Last Day, and maybe not even then. Who knows what stories they tell in Heaven.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“A lot of heroes hate themselves, it’s why they work so hard to make everybody love them.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“She loved him more than he loved himself. And was that not the point of marriage, to love a person more than they can love themselves?”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“God doesn't come when you snap your fingers, He comes when you're ready for Him." Nimue snapped her delicate fingers, producing a strikingly loud pop in the quiet. "That's the difference between a spell and a prayer.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Britain was a wounded land, cloven in two, British and Roman, pagan and Christian, Stone and Grail, north and south, old and new. It was born in blood and grief and greed, divided eternally against itself, its different natures so mixed it could never extricate itself from itself. No miracle would erase that wound either. But Britain didn’t need a miracle, or a perfect knight, or even God. It would heal all on its own, slowly, the hard way. It would always be a scarred land, a complicated land, but complicated was not the same as broken. It would never be pure or perfect, but it might still one day be whole. How do you live in a waste land? Is there really any such thing? You look for the buried seeds and deep springs. You watch the animals, the lizards and the foxes, and see how they do it. You wait. And when the land was whole, perhaps the king would be whole too. Perhaps he always was.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“It has all cost so much, and come to so little. There’s so much unfinished. But I cannot stay here. I thought I could, but I was mistaken. The world is sea-changed now, and I fear I belong to the Old World. “But this world has marvels in it too. Never doubt it.” Now he looked straight at Collum. “They are of a different kind now. No one will hand them to you. You can’t pull them out of a stone, the way I did, but they’re still there. It’s not too late.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“I love God, and I know He loves me, but the only power I have in this world comes from the other side, and I don’t know why that is.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“What fuel kept that furnace burning so bright and so hot? All fires consume something. It seemed to Palomides that a fire that is not fed, yet still burns, must be consuming itself.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Arthur’s secret was that when he was hardly more than a child they had handed him the whole world, and that world had a flaw in it, and the flaw was him. He was conceived in sin and deception and murder, and no matter how great a king he became, how passionately he pursued perfection and devoted himself to God, he could never change that. That was the catch, that was the cost, and he could never make it right. It was like one of those cursed wounds from the stories, that would never heal.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“God wouldn’t’ve sent him more than he could endure.” “I find your God is a great optimist when it comes to the question of how much people can endure.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“It was a good story. It made him feel better. Stories were useful that way”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled one into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“All boys need a father’s love, and they’ll do anything to get it, and Arthur had tried being good, and it hadn’t worked, so that left only greatness. Perfection. If only, if only Arthur had had a father there to say, it’s all right, this is good enough. You can stop now, I will love you whatever happens, whatever you do, whoever you are. But there was no one there to say it. God would never say stop. And so Arthur never would.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Adventures were quick and exciting when you heard about them, but when you were inside one they happened very, very slowly.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“He couldn’t stop himself, it was like he craved humiliation, like he had a perverse compulsion to see the greatest in the land and to prove to himself and them and the whole world once and for all how definitively unworthy he really was.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Britannia was a weird place, no question. Growing up in a Mediterranean clime, Scipio never imagined in a thousand years that he would come here. Britannia was so cold and distant and insular and northerly as to be almost mythological, a miserably damp demi-realm confabulated out of gray stone and wet leaves and coarse grass. A different sun hung over Britain, a worn, debased tin version of the great golden coin that stared unblinking down at Rome.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Of all the animals,” she said, “only man can feel a despair that is beyond his power to endure.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“What does it mean, Bedivere? I wanted to be good, and I wanted to serve God, and I found I could not do both.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“He knew it for a certainty. It was coming, and then it would have happened. Time was always stealing away bits of your future and replacing them with memories, and then the memories faded. Like trading real gold for fairy gold, and who thought that was a fair trade? But God must, or He wouldn’t have made time that way.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“The world had tried to teach him to hate himself, but he’d seen through the lie and understood who he was. They carried scars, both of them, but scars were tougher than skin.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Years later he would discover that in Britain it was customary for a fourth son to carry the image of a swift on his shield, because a swift was a bird that was believed to have no feet and spent its entire life on the wing, never landing, from birth to death.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“She wanted to achieve goodness, not perfection. After all if God had nothing to forgive her for then how would he maintain his hard-earned reputation for mercy?”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Dagonet was amazed once again at how unfailingly the world taxed people with the very thing that would try them the most.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“His own father the caliph wouldn’t have embraced him the way this British king had. In Baghdad he was a fourth son, an inconvenient extra, the laughingstock of the paper-sellers’ quarter. But these men had seen him at his absolute worst, humiliated, rejected, wallowing in sin, and here they were waiting for him. They didn’t care what was written on him. They saw the parchment beneath the letters.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“With Arthur and Galahad running around I don’t know why people even bother having legitimate children anymore,” Dagonet said. “Bastards are clearly the superior product.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Is there something you want to tell us about Merlin, Nimue?” Palomides asked. “Not really, no.” “If Merlin were free,” Dinadan said, “I bet Arthur would still be alive.” “If Merlin were such a fucking great wizard then he wouldn’t be stuck under a hill, would he?”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“There are amazing writers—Mary Stewart, Bernard Cornwell, Nicola Griffith—who have stripped away that high medieval gloss and taken Arthur back to his sixth-century roots, with proper period armor and weaponry and culture and geopolitics.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“You’ve done all you can. More than any of us. Time for somebody to take care of you for a change.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword