The Ill-Made Knight Quotes

“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.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments without difficulty.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“Lancelot tried to have a Word. His Word was valuable to him not only because he was good, but also because he was bad. It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them.”
― T.H. WHite, The Ill-Made Knight

“You could pretend that Guenever was a sort of man-eating lioncelle herself, or that she was one of those selfish women who insist on ruling everywhere. In fact, this is what she did seem to be to a superficial inspection. She was beautiful, sanguine, hot-tempered, demanding, impulsive, acquisitive, charming - she had all the proper qualities for a man-eater. But the rock on which these easy explanations founder, is that she was not promiscuous. There was never anybody in her life except Lancelot and Arthur. She never ate anybody except these. And even these she did not eat in the full sense of the word. People who have been digested by a man-eating lioncelle tend to become nonentities - to live no life except within the vitals of the devourer. Yet both Arthur and Lancelot, the people whom she apparently devoured, lived full lives, and accomplished things of their own.

She lived in warlike times, when the lives of young people were as short as those of airmen in the twentieth century. In such times, the elderly moralists are content to relax their moral laws a little, in return for being defended. The condemned pilots, with their lust for life and love which is probably to be lost so soon, touch the hearts of young women, or possibly call up an answering bravado. Generosity, courage, honesty, pity, the faculty to look short life in the face - certainly comradeship and tenderness - these qualities may explain why Guenever took Lancelot as well as Arthur. It was courage more than anything else - the courage to take and give from the heart, while there was time. Poets are always urging women to have this kind of courage. She gathered her rose-buds while she might, and the striking thing was that she only gathered two of them, which she kept always, and that those two were the best.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“This knight's trouble from his childhood--which he never completely grew out of--was that for him God was a real person. He was not an abstraction who punished you if you were wicked or rewarded you if you were good, but a real person like Guenever, or like Arthur, or like anybody else. Of course he felt that God was better than Guenever or Arthur, but the point was that he was personal. Lancelot had a definite idea of what he looked like, and how he felt--and he was somehow in love with this Person.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“The increasingly cynical court thought Arthur, "hypocritical, as all decent men must be if you assume decency cannot exist.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“Morals are difficult things to talk about, but what has happened is that we have invented a moral sense, which is rotting now that we can't give it employment. And when a moral sense begins to rot it is worse than when you had none. I suppose that all endeavours which are directed to a purely worldly end, as my famous Civilization was, contain within thelmselves the germs of their own corruption”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“People will do the basest things on account of their so-called honour.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“The author says people are guilty of "wrecking the present because the future was bound to be a wreck.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“The tents were being let down, the banners waved. The cheers which now began, round after round, were like drumfire or thunder, rolling around the turrets of Carlisle. All the field, and all the people in the field, and all the towers of the castle, seemed to be jumping up and down like the surface of a lake under rain. In the middle, quite forgotten, her [Gueneviere's] lover was kneeling by himself. This lonely and motionless figure knew a secret which was hidden from the others. The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle. "And ever," says Malory, "Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten.”
― T H White, The Ill-Made Knight

“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. There is no need for us to try to understand it. We do not have to dabble in a place which he preferred to keep secret.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“Kings can only use their best tools.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“Tio Dap cavalgava em silêncio atrás do infeliz rapaz. Sabia de uma coisa que o outro ainda estava muito verde para saber — que havia treinado o melhor cavaleiro da Europa. Como um chapim excitado que criara um cuco, Tio Dap seguia alvoroçado atrás de seu prodígio. Levava a armadura de combate, ordenadamente amarrada segundo seu método e artimanhas, pois, de agora em diante, seria o escudeiro de Lancelot.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“You have always been full and perfect, so you had nothing to make up for. But I have always been making up.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“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.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“It is only people who are lacking, or bad, or inferior, who have to be good at things.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“You are my miracle, and I would throw them all overboard for the sake of you.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“No… - dijo sir Lanzarote–, pues una vez caído en la vergüenza quizá no vuelva a recobrarse.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight