I may flesh out these little excerpts some day ... but just go out & buy the book ... :)
Include link to purchase online? - click
The ISBN number is 0 00 648301 1
Notes on the bits I read today -
Page 162 - evident enjoyment
Plus ... "It was a lovely afternoon. Outside the schoolroom window the larches of the distant forest had already taken on the fullness of their dazzling green, the earth twinkled and swelled with a million drops, and every bird in the world had come home to court and sing."
Page 163 - with Merlyn asking "What would you like to be?" ... and "I've been a bird once, but it was only in the mews at night, and I never got a chance to fly ..."
Page 164 - something about a 'distorted sense of humour' ... :)
Page 165 about the pigeons - beautiful description ... and the cooing ...
Page 167 - "It is the liquid notes of a river that we hear in a robin's song" & describing how the other bird 'languages' came to be ...
Page 169 - "It was too beautiful to sleep ... He watched out at the stars in a kind of trance ..." & "unutterable thoughts of space and eternity would baffle themselves" ... another great section & I'd only been reading some ten or 15 minutes ... :)
Page 178 - the word 'anseriformes' is one I had never encountered before ... whether he made it up or ... worth plugging into Google at some stage ...
Page 180 about no boundaries among geese ... and taking to the air makes the whole notion of boundaries look a trifle silly ... well, you don't need to actually take to the air for it to be seen as daft ... :)
Page 183 - the poems sung by migrating geese! :)
Page 185 - "The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever, the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. Then, in moment of time, they would be back in the jeweled world once more ..." - that whole section really ... of what it would be like to be in such a flock ...
Page 189 - "Merlyn looked younger every year - which was only natural, because he was."
Page 192 - whole conversation with Merlin about a whole range of stuff ... "Why do people not think, when they are grown up, as i do when I am young?" ... how does one answer such a question ... well, if one is Merlyn, one might respond with, "Suppose you wait until you are grown up and know the reason?" :)
Page 193 - "The best thing for being sad ..." {You'll have to buy the book to see what Merlyn says here ...}
Page 198 mentions 'may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest' ... was this the first time the expression was coined? I've no idea ... {Update - it is from Hamlet!}
and the word 'mollocky' ...
Page -
Really MUST transcribe pages 203 to 205 about the chicken & the egg thesis! ...
'It is not very good,' he explained coyly. 'It is just a rough draft, you know. I shall alter it a lot before I send it in.
'I am sure it must be interesting.'
'Oh no, it's not a bit interesting. It is just an odd thing I threw off in an odd half-hour, just to pass the time. But still, this is how it begins.'
'Hem!' said the badger. Then he put on an impossibly high falsetto voice and began to read as fast as possible.
'People often ask, as an idle question, whether the process of evolution began with the chicken or the egg. Was there an egg out of which the first chicken came, or did a chicken lay the first egg? I am in a position to say that the first thing created was the egg.
'When God had manufactured all the eggs out of which the fishes and the serpents and the birds and the mammals and even the duck-billed platypus would eventually emerge, He called the embryos before him, and saw that they were good.
'Perhaps I ought to explain,' added the badger, lowering his papers nervously and looking at Wart over the top of them, 'that all embryos look very much the same. They are what you are before you are born - and, whether you are going to be a tadpole or a peacock or a cameleopard or a man, when you are an embryo you just look like a peculiarly repulsive and helpless human being. I continue as follows:
'The embryos stood in front of God, with their feeble hands clasped politely over their stomachs and their heavy heads hanging down respectfully, and God addressed them.
'He said: "Now, you embryos, here you are, all looking exactly the same, and We are going to give you the choice of what you want to be. When you grow up you will get bigger anyway, but We are pleased to grant you another gift as well. You may alter any parts of yourselves into anything which you think will be useful to you in later life. For instance, at the moment you cannot dig. Anybody who would like to turn his hands into a pair of spades or garden forks is allowed to do so. Or, to put it another way, at present you can only use your mouths for eating. Anybody who would like to use his mouth as an offensive weapon, can change it by asking and be a corkindrill or sabre-toothed tiger. Now then, step up and choose your tools, but remember that what you choose you will grow into, and will have to stick to."
'All the embryos thought the matter over politely, and then, one by one, they stepped up before the eternal throne.
* spell checked to here ( I think ...)
Argh! ... I'm half-way through tapping out these words and I go back online 2 check my email and had a bit of a search and ONE page in cyberspace does have this section ...
Just in case ... I'll paste the rest ... :)
"All the embryos thought the matter over politely, and then, one by one, they stepped up before the eternal throne. They were allowed two or three specializations, so that some chose to use their arms as flying machines and their mouths as weapons, or crackers, or drillers, or spoons, while others selected to use their bodies as boats and their hands as oars. We badgers thought very hard and decided to ask for three boons. We wanted to change our skins for shields, our mouths for weapons and our arms for garden forks. These boons were granted. Everybody specialized in one way or another, and some of us in very queer ones. For instance, one of the desert lizards decided to swap his whole body for blotting-paper, and one of the toads who lived in the drouthy antipodes decided simply to be a water-bottle.
"The asking and granting took up two long days--they were the fifth and sixth, so far as I remember--and at the very end of the sixth day, just before it was time to knock off for Sunday, they had got through all the little embryos except one. This embryo was Man.
" 'Well, Our little man,' said God. 'You have waited till the last, and slept on your decision, and We are sure you have been thinking hard all the time. What can We do for you?'
" 'Please God,' said the embryo, 'I think that You made me in the shape which I now have for reasons best known to Yourselves, and that it would be rude to change. If I am to have my choice I will stay as I am. I will not alter any of the parts which You gave me, for other and doubtless inferior tools, and I will stay a defenceless embryo all my life, doing my best to make myself a few feeble implements out of the wood, iron and the other materials which You have seen fit to put before me. If I want a boat I will try to construct it out of trees, and if I want to fly, I will put together a chariot to do it for me. Probably I have been very silly in refusing to take advantage of Your kind offer, but I have done my very best to think it over carefully, and now hope that the feeble decision of this small innocent will find favour with Yourselves.'
" 'Well done,' exclaimed the Creator in delighted tones. 'Here, all you embryos, come here with your beaks and whatnots to look upon Our first Man. He is the only one who has guessed Our riddle, out of all of you , and We have great pleasure in conferring upon him the Order of Dominion over the Fowls of the Air, and the Beasts of the Earth, and the Fishes of the Sea. Now let the rest of you get along, and love and multiply, for it is time to knock off for the week-end. As for you, Man, you will be a naked tool all your life, though a user of tools. You will look like an embryo till they bury you, but all the others will be embryos before your might. Eternally undeveloped, you will always remain potential in Our image, able to see some of Our sorrows and to feel some of Our joys. We are partly sorry for you, Man, but partly hopeful. Run along then, and do your best. And listen, Man, before you go . . .'
" 'Well?' asked Adam, turning back from his dismissal.
" 'We were only going to say,' said God shyly, twisting Their hands together. 'Well, We were just going to say, God bless you.' "
Page 213 - "Perhaps, if you happen not to have lived in the Old England of the twelfth century, or whenever it was, and in a remote castle on the borders of the Marches at that, you will find it difficult to imagine the wonders of their journey.
Page 217 - fabulous description of the sword in the stone ... esp the section about 'the Punch & Judy ghosts of remembered days' ...
Page 218 - "Fold your powers together, with the spirit of your mind, and it will come out like butter. Come along, Homo sapiens, for all we humble friends of yours are waiting here to cheer.'
Page 233 - "Arthur was a young man, just on the threshold of life. He had fair hair and a stupid face, or at any rate there was a lack of cunning in it. It was an open face, with kind eyes and a reliable or faithful expression, as though he were a good learner who enjoyed being alive and did not believe in original sin. He had never been unjustly treated, for one thing, so he was kindly to other people ..."
Page 236 - {Another exchange betwixt Merlyn & Arthur} "It is nothing. I am due to fall in love with a girl named Nimue in a short time, and then she learns my spells and locks me up in a cave for several centuries. It is one of those things ..." :)
Page 245 - "My father was a demon, they say ..." & "Life is too bitter already, without territories and wars and noble feuds"
Page 252 - "... keep away from all unnatural excitement from this time forward. For that matter, ye must keep away from all natural excitement also ..."
Page 254 - "Let us sit and talk wisely, my heroes, on deep matters."
Page 261 - "You might say that this moment was the critical one in his career - the moment towards which he had been living backward for heaven know how many centuries, and now he was to see for certain whether he has lived in vain ..."
Page 262 - "It is as if people are half horrible and half nice. Perhaps they are even more than half horrible, and when they are left to themselves they run wild ..."
Page 264 - something about Nunc Dimittis and "There, Merlyn, that is all I can think of. I have thought as hard as I could, and I suppose I am wrong, as usual. But I did think. I can't do any better. Please say something!"
Page 267 - "He was a source of mental nourishment to them - a sort of guru, as Merlyn had been to Arthur, who gave them what little culture they were ever to get. They resorted to him like hungry puppies, anxious for any kind of eatable, when their mother had cast them out." ... plus "What do I want to be a saint for at all, is my puzzle!"
Page 268 - "It's bewitched I am entirely." "I think we are bewitched too!" ...
Page 269 - "It must be dreadful to have a witch for a mother." "Or a wife ..."
Page 270 - "They considered the idea with a beginning of hope.
Page 271 - much mention of Cocodrills, Sirens, Peridexions, Dragons, Antalop, Ibex, the Chaladrius bird, and of course the Unicorn ...
Page 278 - something about catching a cloud and falling into the sky ...
Page 279 - "He became uncomfortable all over. In these circumstances, the only thing to do was abandon the place in which he was feeling uncomfortable, in the hope of leaving his discomfort behind him."
Page 282 - "We could call them the Knights of the Round Table." "What a good name!"
Page 283 - "Look, Merlyn, I don't like knowing about the future, and I am not sure whether I believe in it ..."
"There are some things which I have to tell you, whether you believe them or not."
Page 284 - "The business of the philosophers is to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people."
Page 292 - "Along the coast-line the saints and scholars of Eriu inhabited their stone igloos in holy horribleness - reciting fifty psalms in their beehives and fifty in the open air and fifty with their bodies plunged in cold water, in their loathing for the twinkling world.
Page 295 - "Sir Palomides thought it was time to interfere." :)
Page 296 -
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
"Why do you say why?"
"I mean," explained Sir Grummore, "you could say When? or Where? but Why why?"
"Why not?"
Page 305 - "I don't like knowing the future anyway. I had much rather you didn't worry about it, because it only worries me."
"But it is something I must say. It is vital."
"Stop thinking about it," suggested the King, "and then perhaps it will come back."
Page 306 - a parable from Merlyn about Damascus and Aleppo ...
Page 313 - "Love," said Sir Grummore uneasily, "is a pretty strong passion, when you come to think of it."
Page 316 - "The whole Gaelic miasma had faded like the mist it was - whether under the influence of love or of whisky or of its own nature as mist ..."
Page 322 - " ... were shepherded along a glade of Sherwood forest - a wide glade like an estuary of grass with trees on either side."
Page 326 -
He began to revolve on his toes, preparatory to vanishing. Not much of his walking tour was done on foot.
"Merlyn, Merlyn! Wait a bit!"
He reappeared for a moment, saying in a cross voice: "Well, what is it?"
"The Beast will not believe us. What are we to do?"
He frowned.
"Psycho-analyse her," he said eventually, beginning to spin.
"But, Merlyn, wait! How are we to do this thing?"
"The usual method."
"But what is it?" they cried in despair.
He disappeared completely, his voice remaining in the air.
"Just find out what her dreams are and so on. Explain the facts of life. But not too much of Freud."
Page 328 - mentions a spancel and its use to 'charm' the object of one's affection
Page 331 - the description of the scene in the Carlion cathedral ...
Page 332 - There was such a prelatical issuing of admonitions, exhortations and benedictions that it is a wonder the whole congregation id not go to heaven on the spot.
Page 334 - the pedigree of Mordred, which is something I hadn't been too clear on previously ... Arthur - Mordred - Igraine - Morgause ... and Uther ...
Page 339 - In the castle of Benwick, the French lad was looking at his face in the polished surface of a kettle-hat. It flashed in the sunlight with the stubborn gleam of metal. It was practically the same as the steel helmet which soldiers wear, and it did not make a good mirror, but it was the best he could get. He turned the hat in various directions, hoping to get an average idea of his face from the different distortions which the bulges made. He was trying to find out what he was, and he was afraid of what he would find.
Page 341 - Lancelot's dream about the water in the well he wanted to drink ...
... "But there was a more insistent thought in his head also. It was a thought about the face in the metal, and about the thing which must have gone wrong in the depths of his spirit to make a face like that.
Page 342 - comparison between Lancelot as a knight and Bradman as a cricketer (with some mention of Frank Woolley)
Page 345 - They might have wondered why he was so strange.
Page 346 - He had to teach himself to possess a sound opinion on hundreds of disputed points ..."
Page 347 - He wanted, through his purity and excellence, to be able to preform some ordinary miracle - to heal a blind man or something like that, for instance.
Page 348 - Nobody can be a maestro without being subject to these excitements, so Lancelot seldom minded ...
Page 351 - "No, of course not. I have been getting bejingled in my brian."
Merlyn began to talk quickly, because he saw that it was a difficult situation. From Lancelot's face, he could not tell if he was hurt or whether it was like that always.
{Phew. Only 460 pages or so to go ...}
Here's an Arthur page I found this evenin ...
Page 353 - first time Camelot gets a mention ...
Page 355 - It was typical of Arthur not to lose his temper, typical of him to sit on the ground making noises of admiration when he had just been given a great fall.
Page 356 - ... the Round Table was going as well as could be expected, but very slowly, and how, now that Lancelot had arrived, everything would come right before they knew where they were.
Page 357 - "You can't expect a thing like that to go smoothly all the time. But the idea is there, and people are beginning to understand it, and that is the great thing. I am sure it will work"
She brought them up with so little love or security that they find it difficult to undestand warm-hearted people themselves. They are suspicious and frightened.
Page 358 - It is because the hawks themselves are furious creatures and the people who associate with them catch it.
Page 360 - He had grown into a beautifully polite youth, in spite of his ugliness, and he was too self-conscious to have petty thoughts for long.
The jerfalcon was in a foul temper, and Lancelot caught its mood. Guenever, who was not particularly good with hawks and had no particular interest in them, was frightened by hos frowning brow, and because she was frightened she became clumsy.
... The young man knew, in this moment, that he had hurt a real person of his own age. He saw in her eyes that she thought he was hateful, and that he had surprised her badly. She had been giving kindness and he had returned it with unkindness. But the main thing was that she was a real person. She was not a minx, not deceitful, not designing and heartless. She was pretty Jenny, who could think and feel.
Page 362 - Inspired by the royal train of thought, he added the exclamations of Rufus ...
Arthur's reaction to the problem was complicated. Merlyn's warning about his lady and his best friend had contained within itself the seeds of its own contradiction, for your friend can hardly be your friend if he is also going to be your betrayer. Arthure adored his rose-petaled Guenever for her dash, and had an instinctive respect for Lancelot, which was soon to become affection. This made it difficult either to suspect or not to suspect.
{PLUS the rest of that chapter really ...}
Page 365 - But the curious thing was that under the king-post of keeping faith with himself and with othershe had a contradictory nature that was far from holy.
One reason why he fell in love with Guenever was because the first thing he had done was to hurt her. he might never have noticed her as a person if he had not seen the pain in her eyes.
An ordinary fellow, who did not spend half his life torturing himself by trying to discover what was right so as to conquer his inclination towards what wwas wrong, might have cut the knot which brought their ruin.
Page 366 - We shall have to describe one of these quests in detail - so as to show the way in which he tried to distract himself, and the way in which this famous honour of his worked.
Page 368 - If he had lived now he might even have been locked in a lunatic hospital, and his friends would have certainly urged him to be psychoanalysed. {Bok written in 1941 before the advent of neuroleptics!
}
Page 369 - Lancelot was so worn out by the struggle within himself ... {this whole chapter really ...}
Page 379 - "Some say he is a madman ..."
Page 380 - People nowadays ran recognise cricketers, even when their faces are too far away to be seen ...
Page 383 - They would have written to The Times about it, if there had been such a paper.
The situation became divorced from common sense ...
Page 391 - At twenty-two, the age of thirty seems to be the verge of senility.
Page 394 - "This Round Table was a good thing when we thought of it."
Page 395 - "I made it a round table to prevent that very thing, but it did not prevent it."
"People do the basest things in the name of their so-called honour. I wish I had never invented honour, or sportsmanship, or civilisation."
Page 397 - 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 that we cannot explain. He could not have explained either ...
{another excellent chapter}
Page 398 - But Lancelot never believed he was good or nice. Under the grotesque magnificent shell, with a face like Quasimodo's, there was shame and sef-loathing which had been planted there when he was tiny, by something which is now too late to trace. It is too fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.
Page 399 - He was supposed to be slightly mad, because he believed himself to be a relative of Joseph of Arimathaea.
All the people of the village were in the street, as if they were waiting for him, and there was a dreamlike quality in the air, as if a shower of gold dust had come from the sun. Lancelot felt peculiar. His blood might have had too much oxygen in it,
Page 400 - The danger about being the best knight in the world was that if you were always being tested about it, the day was bound to come when you would fail to retain the title.
Page 402 - It is all written down arithmetically in the stones at Stonehenge, and I have some sort of holy dish in my castle at Carbonek together with a dove which flies in various directions holding a censer of gold in its beak.
Page 403 - Now his power to be busy was gone. He felt that he might as well be in one place as another, if he was only waiting to see if his heart would break or not.
... One evening ... when the gnawing in the boy's heart had made it impossible for him to eat properly or even to sit still at dinner, the butler took the situation in hand.
{May tap out more of that section at some stage}
Page 404 - He was bothering Lancelot, who wanted to be alone with his misery, and Lancelot realised he was being bothered. For this reason, he automatically wondered whether he had not perhaps been discourteous to the butler in his distraction.
Page 405 - "You will have good news in a minute, that you will, and you want to seize the unfogiving minute, as the bard says."
... He was fully aware, in the suddenness of a second, of all that had happened the previous night ...
Page 406 - Children believe such things to this day, and think that they will only be able to bowl well in the cricket match tomorrow, provided that they are good today.
Page 408 - Chapter XIII of The Ill-made Knight ... says a mountain in three pages - may tap it all out one-of-these-daze ...
... It is something that cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules ... You cannot teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically - she has to learn the stramge pose of walking by experience ...
Page 409 - It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds.
I'm back online and found a larg-ish excerpt of this section:
The search did toss up some interesting sites ...
Page 412 - Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or snowed. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them.
Page 413 - One day, when they were at the stage of telling each other their private feelings, with a sort of innocent amazement when they corresponded, Lancelot gave the Queen his secret.
Page 416 - She had shame and hatred of what she might say, but she could not help saying it.
Page 418 - But he now remained without the temporary peace of heart which he had been able to invent for himself while the king was away.
Page 419 - He seldom sat down, but strayed about with nervous movements, picking things up and setting them down without looking at them, walking to windows and looking out but seeing nothing.
... Yet the thought was probably there, unconscious and undetectable except to women.
Page 420 - It would not be accurate to say that she was aware of them in a logical sense, but they were present in her deeper mind. It is a pity that language is such a clumsy weapon ...
... She tormented herself with a thousand words of the same sort. But what she felt to herself, in the uncharted regions of her heart was a different matter.
... The effect of such an education was that he had grown up without any of the useful accomplishments for living - without malice, vanity, suspicion, cruelty and the commoner forms of selfishness. ... He had been given too much love and trust to be good at these things.
Page 421 - Now, with a situation developing before his eyes which has always been notoriously difficult of solution - so difficult that it has been given a label and called the Eternal Triangle, as if it were a geometric problem like the Pons Asinorum in Euclid - Arthur was able only to retreat. It is gnerally the trustful and optimistic people who can afford to retreat. The loveless and faithless ones are compelled by their pessimism to attack.
... he was hoping to weather the situation by refusing to become conscious of it.
Page 422 - Lancelot, with an uncontrollable desire to get some of his misery off his chest by telling about it - and yet unable to tell the true story to this particular listener - began a long rigmarole about Elaine.
Page 423 - "People get made unhappy by the world, and we must help them when we can."
"Welcome to Camelot. Five thousand welcomes."
Page 425 - Elaine began to sob helplessly. She looked repulsive, with her red nose, as people do when they abdicate their dignity.
... She leaned over the wrappings, making the foolish gestires and meaningless sounds which mothers delight to use when their babies are beginning to pay attention.
Page 429 - "But waht are we to do?" asked the Queen. "Is he mad? Will he get better? What will happen? Ought we to do something"
... Then - slowly, deeply, primitively - she began to cry. She put her face in her hands and throbbed with sorrow.
Page 430 - There was a frightful row outside, and I went out, and there was this naked lunatic ...
Page 431 - "You ought not to be fighting, old boy. I can see that what you need is a good sleep and something to eat."
Page 432 - "My dwarf, who is a splendid little chap, said we ought not to do him any harm, because he was touched by God ..."
... "We tied his hands and feet ... I am sorry about it now, but we could not chance it according to what we knew at the time."
Page 433 - "I don't know to this day how I got away with my life."
Page 435 - All of us have been driven nearly mad by our wives and sweethearts, but King Pelles was aware that there is a tough streak in human nature which generally prevents us from beingquite driven ... and he wanted to find out whether there had been a streak of lunacy in the family which could account for it.
Page 436 - As a matter of fact, nearly all hermits seemed to be called Nacien in those days.
... "Look at that great scar there. Perhaps he was a knight errant before he went mad, and so we ought to give him courtesy."
Page 438 - Karnkeepamanlocktupforever
:)
Page 439 - A woman can forget a lot of love in two years - or, at any rate, she can pack it away, and grow accustomed to it, and hardly remember it any more than a business-man might remember an occasion where, by ill-luck, he failed to make an investment that would have made him a millionaire.
Page 440 - ... he went without protest. He was a mysterious child.
Page 441 - "Tell him to look up Madness in Bartholomeus Anglicus
Page 442 - ... Dr Bartholomew's book had recommended that madmen be gladdened with instruments.
Page 447 - She could only use patience and hope and self-restraint, poor tools when matched against the heart-felt mania of love ...
Page 449 - Lancelot stood still, like a tired child being undressed.
Page 450 - All her powers, all the frontier guards of her spirit, were being called in and concentrated at the citadel of her heart.
Page 452 - "But the whole question is imaginary."
Page 453 - "Perhaps it is a thing which has to happen."
Page 455 - Lancelot's hair, which had already turned badger-grey when he first came back from his madness as a fellow of twenty-six, was quite white.
How condescending, how splendidly democratic of Sir Lancelot, to alugh, as if he were an ordinary man!
Page 457 - spelling - "It had bee responsible" - okay, bee is a proper word and so a spell-check might miss it ... click :)
Page 458 - Such had been the England that Arthur had inherited, such the birthpangs of the civilisation which he had sought to invent.
Page 462 - Lancelot looked uncomfortable. He had an instinctive dislike for Mordred, and did not like having it.
... "It's a bad story. I would rather not talk about it."
Page 463 - "... it can't be established by Force Majeur ... I am afraid I have sown the whirlwind, and I will reap the storm."
{Plus mention of Lamorak}
Page 466 - He had been born slightly crooked ...
Page 467 - "Don't ever let anybody teach you to think: it is the curse of the world."
Page 469 - "Morals are difficult things to talk about ..."
... "But why can't we pull our Table together by turning its energies to the spirit?"
Page 470 - "I think this is the most splendid idea you ahve ever had!"
Page 471 - But Lancelot's mind was not made for metaphysics.
... "We could search for the Holy Grail!" he cried triumphantly.
Page 472 - Arthur and Guenever, like good children, sat with their hands in their laps to listen to the stories. Like children, they were alert and eager, sifting the truth as best they could.
... "Tuts, there is thing-a-bit to tell."
Page 473 - "The man's a vegetarian and teetotaller, and he makes believe he is a vairgin."
Page 474 - "He has growing pains, perhaps. I don't think we ought to judge him unkindly for little faults of social intercourse."
Page 476 - "Ye mind how any man may twist a dream."
Page 478 - "Give me a moral man who insists on doing the right thing all the time, and I will show you a tangle which an angel couldn't get out of."
Page 479 - "Morals seem to run in my family ..."
... "You mustn't take me seriously. Bors is a dear fellow, and if there is ever to be a saint in our family, it will be him. He isn't bright in the head, and he is a bit of a prig, but his guesses are sometimes pure gold. I believe God has been testing him, during this quest, and i am not sure he has not come out trumps ..."
Page 480 - "Well, the first thing that happened after putting his life in order was that he began having visions. He saw the pelican in her piety, and a swan and a raven and some rotten woodand some flowers. It all had to do with his theology, and he did explain it to me, but I can't remember."
... "Bors and I have always been fond of each other, as you know. This tiff is nothing. We have always loved each other in our way ..."
Page 481 - " ... Bors found me apparently dead, and he had taken my body to an abbey for burial. Of course, I recovered later."
Page 482 - "Oh, they were only a collection of fiends, of course. The whole tower turned up-so-down and vanished immediately ..."
Page 483 - "I admit that I was in a bitter frame of mind. In fact, I was murderous ..."
Page 483 - "... it's all very well to take up with morals and dogmas, so long as there is only youself in it: but what are you to do when other people join the muddle?"
Page 484 - "Don't forget that I was in a frightful rage ... they were baffling me with a sort of moral weapon ... I'm afraid that I was simply in a passion ... You know how I get ... You know how it is. It is like the sulks ... I was more maddened than ever, by this time, partly by shame ... Poor Bors. What were his feelings at this moment, I don't like to think ..."
"Passive resistance," said Arthur with intense interest. "It is a new weapon. But it seems difficult to use."
Page 485 - "I don't know exactly what happened, but the sun was flaming down on our shields. Something happened. We suddenly stopped fighting and began to laugh. ... Bors will find the Grail, if anybody does find it, and that is the end of my story."
They sat silent, finding it difficult to talk about spiritual matters
... "Dogmas are difficult thigs," said Arthur
{Here's Malory's account of similar happenings}
Page 486 - "I am trying to make a new law in Britain ... have you thought how it might be uphill work for me?"
Page 486 - Arthur looked at his hands, as he often did when he was in trouble.
Page 487 - But he must have made a fairly good husband, mustn't he, for my mother to die of loneliness because he had gone?
Page 488 - He was gentle and humble and a bit vague. He was shy too.
... They were both fond of animals, for one thing, and knew how to get on with them. There was Daddy's Questin Beast and now Percy seems to have been befriending lions mainly, since he went away.
Page 491 - ... a scroll on it which warned people off unless they were in perfect faith - but Galahad stepped aboard as usual, with his insuffereable self-confidence
Page 493 - If you have learned to fly, or been taught by a great musician or fencer, you have only to remember that teatcher, to know how the people of Camelot had come to view Lancelot.
... They were as motionless as Lord Burleigh is said to have been at Queen Elizabeth's councils, or as a sleek cat who faces the mousehole secretly - a presence, a concentration.
Page 494 - A magic, a mind-reading, an intuition must have taken place - for all the palace battlements and turrets, and the drawbridge of the Great Gate, were thronged with people waiting, and watching, and pointing in silence, before ever he appeared. When the tiny figure could be seen, threading wearily through the far trees of the chase, a murmuration went up among the people. It was Lancelot in a scarlet gown beside the white. He was safe.
Page 496 - But now the same girl was standing in other surroundings, the surroundings of bad make-up and loud silks, by which she was trying to defy the invincible doom of human destiny.
... It is I, inside here ... Don't look at all this. Look at me. I am still here, in the eyes.
Page 498 - 'They complain about his being inhuman.'
Lancelot considered his cup.
'He is inhuman,' he said at last, 'But why should he be human? Are angels supposed to be human?'
'I don't quite follow.'
'Do you think that if the Archangel Michael were to come here this minute, he would say: "What charming weather we are having today! Won't you have a glass of whisky?"'
'I suppose not.'
'Arthur, you mustn't feel that I am rude when I say this. You must remember that I have been away in strange and desert places, sometimes quite alone, sometimes in a boat with nothing but God and the whistling sea. Do you know, since I have been back with people, I have felt I was going mad? Not from the sea, but from the people. All my gains are slipping away, with the people round me. A lot of the things which you and Jenny say seem to me to be needless: strange noises, empty. You know what I mean. "How are you?" - "Do sit down." - "What nice weather we are having!" What does it matter? People talk far too much. Where I have been, and where Galahad is, it is a waste of time to have "manners". Manners are only needed between people, to keep their empty affairs in working order. Manners makyth man, you know, not God. So you can understand how Galahad may have seemed inhuman, and mannerless, and so on, to the people who were buzzing and clacking about him. He was far away in his spirit, living on desert islands, in silence, with eternity.'
'I see.'
'Please don't think me rude to say these things. I am trying to explain a feeling. If you had even been to Patrick's Purgatory, you would know what I mean. People seem ridiculous when you come out.'
Page 500 - 'The first thing I can remember feeling, when I was lying on the ground, was pure astonishment. It was only later that it turned to something else.'
Page 501 - 'I felt as if she had broken the last piece of my heart.'
... 'I rode to a chapel again, fearing as if I might be going mad again.'
Page 501 - 'Arthur, if I don't make you understand about that night, you will never understand the rest.'
Page 502 - 'I heard the little fowls singing - and that cheered me up. Funny to be comforted by a lot of birds.'
Page 503 - 'I suppose you were in a state of grace, after your good confession ...'
Page 504 - 'And next morning I went to another hermit to be confessed again.'
Page 505 - 'I thanked God for the adventure.'
... 'I know I can't explain to you about the ship at this hour, because, for one thing, it is fading from me now that I am with people.'
Page 506 - At night, when it was calm, you could see the stars reflected on the wet sands.
Page 507 - In the silence which fell on the room, they pursued their separate thoughts ...
Page 508 - 'Funny,' said Lancelot, 'how the people who can't pray say that prayers are not answered, however much the people who can pray say that they are.'
... 'Arthur, this must seem untrue as I tell it. I don't know a way of putting it in words.'
Page 510 - For more than a year they had waited on a Queen who was petulant, cruel, contradictory and miserable. Now she was pleased with anything ...
... In fact, that is what she did seem to be, to a superficial inspection.
... She was not the kind who can be fitted away safely under some label or other.
Page 511 - Like likes like, they say ...
... It is difficult to write about a real person.
... Poets are always urging women to have such courage.
Page 512 - For her there were no recognised diversions except what is comparable to the ladies' bridge party of today.
... These were the amusements of grown-up women in her day.
... As she grew to her difficult age, she did strange things. She even became unpopular. But unpopularity is often a compliment ...
Page 513 - Women, he had told himself wisely, are unpredictable.
At other times he tried to explain to her, in confused words and at great length, about his discovery of God.
Page 514 - It could be senseless to go on waiting for a joy ...
... But it took two to make a renunciation, just as it took two to make love, or to make a quareel.
Page 516 - I was hoping that you would understand about it. About what has happened to me. It would have been easy if you were on that boat as well, or felt it yourself. But I can't make you feel it ...
Page 517 - Now the maturest or the saddest phase had come, in which enthusiasms had been used up for good, and only our famous seventh sense was left to be practised.
Page 518 - She began to behave as if she were a little mad.
Page 519 - Nowadays, when a point of justice is obscure and difficult, each side hires lawyers to argue it out.
Page 525 - But Lancelot had a sort of methodical consideration for people - he was sensitive to things they might be feeling, or might be likely to feel.
Page 526 - Perhaps his famous God did give him something which she could not give.
Page 528 - Lancelot shrugged his shoulders - one of the stupidest things to do, when the other party wants to have a fight.
Page 530 - But the accounts of old cricket matches are inclined to be boring for those who did not actually play in them ...
... but great performances have been gven by others in similar circumstances.
Page 531 - Now, in the face of the poor lady's simple hope, he lacked the courage to break her illusion ...
Page 532 - You can do good embroidery in twenty years.
... He said what he thought, and they said what they thought, and neither of them understood the other a bit.
Page 533 - Bors shrugged his shoulders and turned his back, as much to say that he was not going to listen to talk like that. The whole of his back, as he went to the door, showed what he thought about women. The Queen rushed after him, to retain him by force if necessary. She was not going to be cheated of her scene as easily as that.
Page 534 - She began to look healthier, even beautiful again, as a result of these quarrels.
... Her gentle efforts to guide the hand of destiny ... had not been strong enough.
Page 535 - With his inherited tendency to madness, and his fantastic face, the confusion of his loyalties and moral standards, it must have been difficult enough to keep the balance of life without the various blows which were given to him above the bargain. He could have supported even the extra blows if he had been blessed with a callous heart.
Page 536 - a chain of unnecessary accidents ...
Lancelot was too innocent to be conscious of such things.
Page 540 - He was distracted with misery, not only because he knew that he had been acting unwisely and wickedly, but also because he was genuinely in love with the Queen.
Page 544 - She was serene and sane again.
Page 545 - Nobody knows what they said to each other.
Page 546 - The wildest envy was mixed with his rage.
Page 547 - He was like a man crazy with grief.
Page 548 - He was so certain of the truth of his assertion that he had become obstinate, as people do in violent arguments.
... He was always getting himself into trrouble ... through underestimating the wickedness of the world.
Page 550 - For in those days, love was ruled by a different convention to ours. In those days it was chivalrous, adult, long, religious, almost platonic. It was not a matter about which you could make accusations lightly. It was not, as we take it to be nowadays, begun and ended in a long week-end.
Page 551 - These people had struggled for a quarter of a century to reach their understanding.
... Merlyn had not intended him for private happiness.
... He had kept himself aloof from the pains of Guenever and Lancelot, unconsciously truting them not to bring the matter to his consciousness, not from motives of fear or weak connivance, but from the noblest of motives.
Page 552 - In the scriptoria of the abbeys, and in the castles of the great nobles, the harmless writers scribbled away at Missals and Treatises of Knighthood ...
... Housewives of a provident turn of mind filled their cupboards with treacle as a medicine for bad air ...
Page 553 - Arthur, who always felt the best of everybody, was sure that Lance would be able to do it.
Page 554 - shame which you have sought to conceal from your own mind.
... The people outside are waiting for you to do this miracle because you have traded on their belief that your heart was pure ...
Page 556 - 'Oh, Sir Urre, if only I could help you, how willingly I would'
... Many of the squires were laughing like madmen and slapping each other on the back.
Page 562 - "You are not King of England for all these years, without knowing how to use hypocrisy."
... His attitude was more of malice at random
... "It may not alter it for you, but it alters it for other people. It is such a muddle that nobody cares."
{Then I stopped jottting down page numbers ... the quality of the narrative continues ... something about a complicated moment ... and the intricacies of the 'eternal quadrangle' ...}
Page 641 - "What horrible creatures humans are! If we see a flower as we walk through the fields, we lop off its head with a stick. That is how Gareth has gone."
Page 663 - 'That King of yours, madam, if you will excuse the liberty, is quite beyond my comprehension.'
Page 665 - Anyone who had not seen him for a month or two would have known at once that he was mad - but his brains had gone so gradually that those who lived with him had failed to see it. He was followed by his small black pug dog, flirting its bright eyes and curly tail.
Page 666 - It is the mother's not the lover's lust that rots the mind. It is that which condemns the tragic character to his walking death. {More of this paragraph later, perhaps - it doea appear down near the bottom of this page}
Page 666 - Now that she was dead, he had become her grave. She existed in him like the vampire. When he moved, when he blew his nose, he did it with her movement.
Page 668 - She was accustomed to a life of danger.
Page 672 -
'I am but a man of straw, Arthur.'
'People who say they are no good are always the good ones.'
Page 673 - 'The bravest people are the ones who don't mind looking like cowards.'
Page 674 - Gawaine was surprised at this discovery, which had struck him for the first time.
Page 679 - Even the fire seemed frozen, like a painted one.
Page 681 - 'Listen to the letter.' {more of this section later? - it reflects on the level of literacy of the times ...}
Page 685 - Force ... the mental illness of humanity
... He was like a scientist who had pursued the root of cancer all his life.
... Looking back at his life, it seemed to him that he had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which, whenever he had checked it, had broken through at a new place, setting him his work to do again.
Page 686 - Behind this thought there was a worse one, with which he dared not grapple. {More of this para later too?}
Page 687 - The old man had always been a dutiful thinker, never an inspired one. Now his exhausted brain slipped into its accustomed circles: the withered paths, like those of a donkey in the treadmill, round which he had plodded many thousand times in vain
... If it was so easy to lead one's country in various directions, as if she was a pig on a string, why had he failed to lead her into chivalry, into justice and into peace?
Page 688 - It was as if everything would lead to sorrow, so long as man refused to forget the past
... If I were to have my time again, the old King thought, I would bury myself in some monastery, for fear of a Doing which might lead to woe.
Page 689 - The old man's thoughts went laboriously. They were leading him nowhere; they doubled back on themselves and ran the same course twice; yet he was so accustomed to them that he could not stop.
... Perhaps wars were fought because people said my kingdom, my wife, my lover, my possessions.
... But, he thought, assume for one moment that 'having', however it is defined, might be the crux of the problem.
Page 690 - Ideal advice, which nobody was built to follow, was no advice at all.
{A search for that quote tosses up this page
Page 694 - "Will you try to remember that you are a kind of vessel to carry on the idea, when things go wrong ..."
Page -
Page 711 - "Our readers of that time," continued the necromancer in a grim voice, "have exactly three ideas in their magnificent noodles. The first is that the human species is superior to others. The second, that the twentieth century is superior to other centuries. And the third, that the human adults of the twentieth century are superior to their young. The whole illusion may be labelled Progress, and anyone who questions it is called puerile, reactionary, or an escapist. The March of Mind. God help them."
Some Links:
Basic search for the book title ... - plugging in T.H. White may narrow it a tad (from the 1.2 million results) ...
One kid's book review, with a scan of a tattered book cover
A much less-tattered cover :) plus other sample pages
A few satisfied customers (along with some who are less so
Candle in the Wind - the fourth book in the series
)