Any one war seems rooted in its antecedents.

— T.H. White

At this the Wart's eyes grew rounder and rounder, until they were about as big as the owls who was sitting on his shoulder, and his face got redder and redder, and a breath seemed to gather itself beneath his heart.

— T.H. White

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

Don't kill me,' said the knight. 'I yield. I yield. You can't kill a man at mercy.' Lancelot put up his sword and went back from the knight, as if he were going back from his own soul. He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.' Get up,' he said. 'I won't hurt you. Get up, go.' The knight looked at him, on all fours like a dog, and stood up, crouching uncertainly. Lancelot went away and was sick.

— T.H. White

Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.

— T.H. White

Even his conversation was, as it were, a spoken part.

— T.H. White

Everything not forbidden is compulsory

— T.H. White

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 Whenever, 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

Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish.

— T.H. White

He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Upper is move, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldom, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate's. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had.

— T.H. White