All the quotations below are taken from T. H. White's The Once and Future King (1958), a re-telling of the Arthurian legend.
The first section of the novel is called "The Sword in the Stone" and concerns the period of Arthur's youth just before he pulls Excalibur from the stone to become King of England. During this period, while his nickname is "Wart," he is sent a tutor, Merlyn the magician, who sometimes gets his tenses confused because he is living backwards.
All page references are from the Ace Book edition of 1987.
I. from page 44
The Wart's own special (dog) was called Cavall, and he happened to be licking Cavall's nose --- not the other way about --- when Merlyn came in and found him.
"That will come to be regarded as an unsanitary habit," said Merlyn, "though I cannot see it myself. After all, God made the creature's nose just as well as he made your tongue.
"If not better," added the philosopher pensively.
The Wart did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.
2. from page 46
"For this once," said (Merlyn), "I will come. But in future you will have to go by yourself. Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance."
3. from page 75
"Will (the hunting birds) talk?"
"They talk every night, deep into the darkness. They say about how they were taken, about what they can remember of their homes; about their lineage and the great deeds of their ancestors, about their training and what they have learned and will learn. It is a military conversation really, like you might have in the mess of a crack cavalry regiment: tactics, small arms, maintenance, betting, famous hunts, wine, women, and song."
4. from page 131
Everybody was happy. The Saxons were slaves to their Norman masters if you choose to look at it in one way --- but, if you choose to look at it another way, they were the same farm labourers who get along on too few shillings a week today. Only neither the villein nor the farm laborer starved, when the master was a man like Sir Ector. It has never been an economic proposition for an owner of cattle to starve his cows, so why should an owner of slaves starve them? The truth is that even nowadays the farm labourer accepts so little money because he does not have to throw his soul in with the bargain --- as he would have to do in a town --- and the same freedom of spirit has obtained in the country since the earliest times. The villeins were labourers. They lived in the same one-roomed but with their families, few chickens, litter of pigs, or with a cow possibly called Crumbocke --- most dreadful and insanitary! But they liked it. They were healthy, free of an air with no factory smoke in it, and, which, which was most of all to them, their's heart's interest was bound up with their skill in labour. They knew that Sir Ector was proud of them. They were more valuable to him than his cattle even, and, as he valued his cattle more than anything except his children, this was saying a good deal. He walked and worked among his villagers, thought of their welfare, and could tell the good workman from the bad. He was the eternal farmer, in fact --- one of those people who seem to be employing labour at so many shillings a week, but who are actually paying half as much again in voluntary overtime, providing a cottage free, and possibly making an extra present of milk and eggs and home-brewed beer into the bargain.
5. from page 155
"Do you know" asked the Wart, thinking of the thrush, "why birds sing, or how? Is it a language?"
"Of course it is a language. It is not a big language like human speech, but it is large."
"Gilbert White," said Merlyn, "remarks, or will remark, however you like to put it, that 'the language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, little is said, but much is intended.'
6. from page 182
"Sir Ector has given me a glass of canary," said the Wart, "and sent me to see if you can't cheer me up."
"Sir Ector," said Merlyn, "is a wise man."
"Well," said the Wart, "what about it?"
"The best thing for being sad," said Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. 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 honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then --- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn --- pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics --- why you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning how to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can begin again on mathematics, until it is time to learn how to plough."
7. from pages 191, 192, and 193
"Hem!" said the badger. And 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 the 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 look just 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 would be useful to you in later life. For instance, at this 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 a 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. 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 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 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 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.' "
8. from p. 219
"And this, my heroes," concluded Gawaine, "is the reason why we of Cornwall and Orkney must be against the Kings of England ever more, and most of all against the clan Mac Pendragon."
"It is why our Da has gone away to fight against King Arthur whatever, for Arthur is a Pendragon. Our mammy said so."
"And we must keep the feud living forever," said Agravaine, "because Mammy is a Cornwall. Dame Igraine is our Granny."
"We must avenge our family."
"Because our Mammy is the most beautiful woman in the high-ridge, extensive, ponderous, pleasantly-turning world."
"And because we love her."
Indeed, they did love her. Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically --- to those who hardly think about us in return.
9. from pp. 221-222:
The old man crammed his beard in his mouth and began to chew it, as he generally did when he was put about...."I suppose you will learn some day," he said, "but God knows it is heartbreaking, uphill work."
"What is the matter, Merlyn," King Arthur asked. "Have I been doing something wrong? I am sorry if I have."
The magician uncurled his beard and blew his nose.
"It is not so much what you are doing," he said, "It is how you are thinking. If there is one thing I can't stand, it is stupidity. I always say that stupidity is the Sin against the Holy Ghost."
10.