T.H. White · 823 pages
Rating: (2.8K votes)
“Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically--to those who hardly think about us in return.”
“Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”
“If there is one thing I can't stand, it is stupidity. I always say that stupidity is the Sin against the Holy Ghost.”
“You run a grave risk, my boy," said the magician, "of being turned into a piece of bread, and toasted.”
“Life is too bitter already, without territories and wars and noble feuds”
“I think I ought to have some eddication,"said the Wart, "I can't think of anything to do.”
“Merlin: "Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish. I trust we are free of this?"
Arthur: "Everybody knows that children are more intelligent than their parents."
Merlin: "You and I know it, but the people who are going to read this book do not.
Our readers of that time (...) 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 human adults of the twentieth century are superior to their young. (...)”
“Maybe time didn't heal wounds exactly, but it gave you a kind of armor, or a new perspective. A way to remember with a smile instead of a sob.”
“I’m just tellin’ you to keep your eyes open and watch your heart. Or, more to the point, watch your ass because if you don’t, Shy’ll tap it.”
“Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.”
“quietly. “To the cliffs and caves, while we have the sun.” “There you go. They can’t come out. Nothing”
“Identity, though, is a difficult matter to tease out, especially in a time of flux. How to tell a spaniel from a retriever when all dogs have become middle-sized and brown? Should we go by some arbitrary blood quantum wherein half makes an Indian and forty-nine percent makes something else? Certainly forty-nine percent does not a whiteman make, at least not by the laws then prevailing in our state and most others. Or do we go by the old ways, the clans and the mothers, blood degree be damned? Or by what language someone dreams in or prays in or curses in? Or whether they cook bean bread and still tell the tales of Spearfinger and Uktena by the winter fire and go to water when they’re sick? And what if they did all those things but were blond and square-headed as Norsemen? Or do we just hold a dry oak leaf to their cheeks and cull by whether they are darker or lighter?”
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