Once Future King Quotes & Sayings

Hic jacet Arthurus Rex quandam Rexque futurus - the once and future king. — T.H. White

I once heard a sober alcoholic say that drinking never made him happy, but it made him feel like he was going to be happy in about fifteen minutes. That was exactly it, and I couldn't understand why the happiness never came, couldn't see the flaw in my thinking, couldn't see that alcohol kept me trapped in a world of illusion, procrastination, paralysis. I lived always in the future, never in the present. Next time, next time! Next time I drank it would be different, next time it would make me feel good again. And all my efforts were doomed, because already drinking hadn't made me feel good in years. — Heather King

Landsman recognizes the expression on Dick's face ... The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motorcycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved. — Michael Chabon

The four Cs as secret of my success-curiosity, confidence,courage and constancy. — Walt Disney

The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea. — T.H. White

Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law? Can you be your own judge and avenger of your law? Terrible it is to be alone with the judge and avenger of one's own law. Thus is a star thrown out into the void and into the icy breath of solitude. Today you are still suffering from the many being one: today your courage and your hopes are still whole. But the time will come when solitude will make you weary, when your pride will double up and your courage gnash its teeth. And you will cry, "I am alone!" The time will come when that which seems high to you will no longer be in sight, and that which seems low will be all-too-near; even what seems sublime to you will frighten you like a ghost And you will cry, "All is false! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Physicists often quote from T. H. White's epic novel The Once and Future King , where a society of ants declares, 'Everything not forbidden is compulsory.' In other words, if there isn't a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a physical possibility. (The reason for this is the uncertainty principle. Unless something is forbidden, quantum effects and fluctuations will eventually make it possible if we wait long enough. Thus, unless there is a law forbidding it, it will eventually occur.) — Michio Kaku

Wagner cleared his throat once again, then pounded a few chords on the piano. But something unexpected happened when he started to sing. He sounded like Kermit the Frog being run over. — Dylan Callens

We chase dreams and embrace shadows. — Anatole France

Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live, just as it would be easy to join those five dots into a W if you were allowed to look at them forwards, instead of backwards and inside out. But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of Time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight.
~Merlin — T.H. White

Unfortunately we have tried to establish Right by Might, and you just can't do that — T.H. White

A lot of brainless unicorns swaggering about and calling themselves educated just because they can push each other off a horse with a bit of a stick! It makes me tired. — T.H. White

We talk and tease and bargain with the main dish. Maniacal laughter echoes in the marble halls, sweet to my ears.
There's movement at the banquet hall's entrance. A child with my eyes tumbles in - all wings and blue hair and giggling innocence. Holding his hand is Morpheus, wearing a ruby crown.
The Red King. My king.
The bubble bursts and takes the vision with it, leaving nothing but the sound of my gasp and wisps of gray smoke behind.
"You see," Ivory says, "once Morpheus knew that one day you would belong to him and he to you, that you would share a child, he was no longer willing to die to save Wonderland. But he's insecure about your feelings for him. He feared you would refuse to help. So he made a new plan, however flawed it was." — A.G. Howard

Because this story struck me as extraordinary, and it still does. Once upon a time there was a man in a spacesuit in a secret reconnaissance plane reading The Once and Future King, that great historical epic, that comic, tragic, romantic retelling of the Arthurian legend that tussles with questions of war and aggression, and might, and right, and the matter of what a nation is or might be. — Helen Macdonald

I gasp. The profoundness of such a gesture, from a self-seeking fae, touches my soul. The only thing predictable about my future king is his unpredictability. "You once told me you wouldn't be a gentleman. You lied." — A.G. Howard

The Once and Future King. By T. H. White, — Helen Macdonald

Insurance companies pay big bucks for procedures but next to nothing for patient consultations and preventive medicine, which is what most medicine is. — Alex Gibney

It was Christmas night, the eve of the Boxing Day Meet. You must remember that this was in the old Merry England of Gramarye, when the rosy barons ate with their fingers, and had peacocks served before them with all their tail feathers streaming, or boars' heads with the tusks stuck in again - when there was no unemployment because there were too few people to be unemployed - when the forests rang with knights walloping each other on the helm, and the unicorns in the wintry moonlight stamped with their silver feet and snorted their noble breaths of blue upon the frozen air. Such marvels were great and comfortable ones. But in the Old England there was a greater marvel still. The weather behaved itself. — T.H. White

It's only because I refused to tear those spattered maps from the study for years, or to allow you to paint over them as you were so anxious to, that Kevin "remembers" the incident at all. He was, as you observed repeatedly at the time, awfully young.
'I kept them p for my sanity,' I said. 'I needed to see something you'd done to me, to reach out and touch it. To prove that your malice wasn't all in my head.'
'Yeah,' he said, tickling the scar on his arm again. 'Know what you mean. — Lionel Shriver

Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked [Edwin] Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ' knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows,' were engagingly marked by adulterous passion? But T.H. White had already considered that paradigm, was indeed rewriting it at the same time as Tolkien in The Once and Future King; and he had seen the core of Malory's work not in romantic vice but in the human urge to murder. In White the poisonous adder that provokes the last disastrous battle is no adder but a harmless grass-snake, and the flash of the sword which brings on the two armies is not natural self-defense but natural blood-lust, creating a continuum from cruelty to animals to world wars and holocausts. Malory has to be rewritten to encompass a new view of evil. — Tom Shippey

California has always led the way on environmental protection and always reaped the benefits, pioneering everything from catalytic convertors on cars to stationary source reduction. — Ed Begley Jr.

Courtesy costs nothing, which makes it the ideal gift when you're as cheap as I am. — Mark Lawrence

Religion blushing, veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires. — Alexander Pope

Quentin Sollys: the Once and Future King of Spiders. — Seanan McGuire

For everybody that does something bad there's gotta be someone that does something good. — Patrick Wilson

They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them. — T.H. White