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

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

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

1 " She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

2 " If people reach perfection they vanish, you know. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

3 " The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

4 " Everything not forbidden is compulsory "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

5 " Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, although they are often ready to play the buffoon to amuse you, such conduct is the prerogative of the truly wise. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

6 " You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

7 " When shall I be dead and rid
Of all the wrong my father did?
How long, how long 'till spade and hearse
Put to sleep my mother's curse? "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

8 " There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

9 " In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

10 " Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

11 " War is like a fire. One man may start it, but it will spread all over. It is not about one thing in particular. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

12 " It has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

13 " 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. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

14 " The race will find that capitalists and communists modify themselves so much during the ages that they end by being indistinguishable as democrats... "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

15 " He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

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

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

17 " Finally, there was the impediment of his nature. In the secret parts of his peculiar brain, those unhappy and inextricable tangles which he felt at the roots, the boy was disabled by something which we cannot explain. He could not have explained either, and for us it is all too long ago. He loved Arthur and he loved Guenever and he hated himself. The best knight of the world: everybody envied the self-esteem which must surely be his. But Lancelot never believed he was good or nice. Under the grotesque, magnificent shell with a face like Quasimodo’s, there was shame and self-loathing which had been planted there when he was tiny, by something which it is now too late to trace. It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

18 " It is good to put your life in other people's hands. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

19 " But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads.

Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves. "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

20 " It was Christmas night in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage, and all around length. It hung on the boughs of the forest trees in rounded lumps, even better than apple-blossom, and occasionally slid off the roofs of the village when it saw the chance of falling on some amusing character and giving pleasure to all. The boys made snowballs with it, but never put stones in them to hurt each other, and the dogs, when they were taken out to scombre, bit it and rolled in it, and looked surprised but delighted when they vanished into the bigger drifts. There was skating on the moat, which roared with the gliding bones which they used for skates, while hot chestnuts and spiced mead were served on the bank to all and sundry. The owls hooted. The cooks put out plenty of crumbs for the small birds. The villagers brought out their red mufflers. Sir Ector’s face shone redder even than these. And reddest of all shone the cottage fires down the main street of an evening, "

― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)