Arthurian Quotes

“Merlin, do you mind?' It was the King who asked me, a man as old and wise as myself; a man who could see past his own crowding problems, and guess what it might men to me, to walk in dead air where once the world had been a god-filled garden.”
― Mary Stewart

“It is easier to call the storm from the empty sky than to manipulate the heart of a man; and soon, if my bones did not lie to me, I should be needing all the power I could muster, to pit against a woman; and this is harder to do than anything concerning men, as air is harder to see than a mountain.”
― Mary Stewart, The Last Enchantment

“Silence then, and the scent of apple trees, and the nightmare sense of grief that comes when a man wakes again to feel a loss he has forgotten in sleep.”
― Mary Stewart

“Blanchefleur felt a quick rush of affection for her. When the world frowned, Branwen went on smiling. There was a heart of steel under all that froth and bubble.”
― Suzannah Rowntree, Pendragon's Heir

“With her face tilted up to his, the subtle edge of moonlight touched along the edge of one high cheekbone, the tilted edge of one eye, and those beautiful, enticing lips. Obeying an impulse he couldn’t put into words, he lowered his head and covered her mouth with his.”
― Thea Harrison, Spellbinder

“The flock of birds always living in her chest these days had been startled. They flund themselves against the confines of her ribs, beating and flapping in a frenzy inside of her.”
― Kiersten White, The Camelot Betrayal

“How unfortunate that nature was both the most peaceful and the most dangerous place possible. But that was its duality. It gave life and it took it, provided and withheld, offered beauty and danger in equal measure. Camelot was safe and ordered and structured, so many things put in place to separate people from nature. Roofs and walls. Pipes for water. Swords with men to wield them. The separation was a protection but also a loss.”
― Kiersten White, The Camelot Betrayal

“Fostering magical thinking, the chivalric romance yields a space-time in which the marvelous co-exists at all times with mundane routines. Its magic is able to envision the invisible, to endow the amorphous with palpable shape, and to place illusion and reality on the same level. Concurrently, the romance reminds us that it is essential to value the magical realm’s irreducible alterity and inscrutability, rather than attempt to tame it by rationalizing its wonders.”
― Dani Cavallaro, The Chivalric Romance and the Essence of Fiction

“You know, that’s the trouble with humanity—half of the dreamers want to carry us forward, kicking and screaming, into an unrealistic and unattainable future, and the other half want us to fall back into an imaginary ‘simpler time’ when everything was easy.”
― Scott Davis Howard, Believing and Acting: The Pragmatic Turn in Comparative Religion and Ethics

“Beautiful, he whispered. More beautiful than any sunrise or flower, or anything else my eyes have ever seen.”
― Bree Moore, Woven

“That night she dreamed about the King again.
She stood in a riverside meadow between greenwood and castle. Overhead the sun shone gilt in a sky like powdered lapis and struck golden sparks from the King's blood-red dragon banner.”
― Suzannah Rowntree, Pendragon's Heir

“All I could think of was the phrase my dad’s father used to say to him when I was a kid, “Don't let your alligator mouth overload your hummingbird ass,” and I think I’d done just that.”
― Brynn Myers, Falling Out of Focus

“Just when I was coping with the idea that I’d necked with a werewolf,” she muttered. “Just when I was beginning to flirt with the idea of possibly… possibly inviting sex with a werewolf. I’m trying to imagine how I would tell this story to my best friend. I think it would go something like this: See, I’ve never seen him in daylight. He’s just this werewolf guy.”
Beside her, he had stiffened. Very quietly, he said, “Sex?”
― Thea Harrison, Spellbinder

“Whatever small power of guilt Elaine once held over Lancelot, she’d used up long ago. Oh, self-reproach certainly stung him, but it is one of the most ironic paradoxes of the male temperament that the more shame a man feels, the less likely he is to be persuaded to repent by the person whom he has wronged, especially when she uses guilt as a motive. Like most men, Lancelot lashed out in anger when his shame was too much to bear, thus amplifying his guilt, rather than ameliorating it. It is an all too common downward spiral with men who cherish their honor but act dishonorably.”
― Scott Davis Howard, Three Days and Two Knights

“I don’t know,” Scot offered. “Being a hero feels fair and fine to me.”
Mordred turned to him and looked him up and down under his dark brows. “That’s because you’re young, inexperienced, and living in the sunrise glow of a moment of glory. Enjoy it, fellow, while it lasts. You’ve accomplished something that you’ve longed to achieve and felt was an impossible dream since childhood. You’ll have the best half-year of your life (if you’re lucky) and then the glory of this moment will set beyond your horizon. You’ll be left empty, questioning everything, and wishing for a challenge to equal the old. It is the central cycle of every ambitious man’s life—it is the reason he seeks and achieves glory, and the reason that one day his own glory grows too heavy and crushes him, especially as he gets too old to bear its weight.”
― Scott Davis Howard, Three Days and Two Knights

“Our lives are not mapped, they are made.”
― Priya Ardis, Ever My Merlin

“Over the top of the hill a knight came riding. At first I saw only his helmeted head, bent, but even then I knew him and began to run toward him.
A knight riding a weary horse, a battered knight with one arm in a sling, his shield hanging from his saddle. Its device, a single heart-shaped green leaf with a violet blossom.
As I ran toward him he lifted his head, and his eyes smiled at me the warmest blue the world has ever known.”
― Nancy Springer, I Am Morgan le Fay

“Sir Ector looked into the fire, fidgeting with something in his pocket.
"I have something for you," he said at last. "It was your mother's." And he drew out the thing in his pocket and held it up to her.
The ring Blanche took from him was antique silver, cabochon-set with a glimmering moonstone. Her mother's ring! Blanche folded it into her hand and held tightly to the only thing her parents had left her.”
― Suzannah Rowntree, Pendragon's Heir

“I did not do it for you, sire." Gawain was deadly serious now. "Death comes to us and all mortals. I shall still lose you one day. But Logres! The only perfection under heaven would fall if I could not save you.”
― Suzannah Rowntree, Pendragon's Heir

“Then this is for you," Galahad said, and drew a knife from the pouch at his belt. It was an odd little thing, T-hilted and small enough to fit into a woman's hand. Its translucent blade, only an inch and a half long, was bound with scrolling bronze wire to the bone hilt. "Have a care. Obsidian is sharper than anything else in the world, sharp enough to make sunlight bleed.”
― Suzannah Rowntree, Pendragon's Heir

“... the more I seek, the less I find.”
― Norris J. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, Volume 8: The Post-Vulgate Cycle: The Merlin Continuation

“Lo!" said Percivale, "those I had slain were not put to silence. I heard their breath speak out of the lips of others; I saw their looks mock out of the eyes of others; the life that was gone from their bodies was but draughted to enliven fresh matter. In every ray of light, in every gust that blew, the life of the dead moved to confound me. Ah, Saint, the things they had uttered were black and heavy; I could not bear them.”
― Clemence Housman, The Life of Sir Aglovale De Galis

“He cupped her head with both hands. “You’re full of your own kind of magic, and it’s much more rare and beautiful than all the other spells around you. They are commonplace. You are unique.”
― Thea Harrison, Spellbinder

“Lifting his head, he whispered against her wet, throbbing lips, “Too much?”
Wasn’t that sweet,
Consider even.
But oh, hell no.
She gasped, “Not enough.”
― Thea Harrison, Spellbinder

“I know. You are about to say that Satan lifts up the evil lords to thwart God’s power (that’s the standard argument, I believe) but you can’t have it both ways. If there is an all-powerful God who created everything, then He must have created Lucifer to become Satan. If He has a Divine Plan, then Satan is part of that plan—evil, hatred, misery, disease, squalor, death—these must all be part of the plan. Mordred and Malestair and their ilk are part of God’s plan. The other option is that Satan was a mistake. But if God made a mistake—especially one of that magnitude, one Hell of a mistake—how can you believe that He is all-knowing and all-powerful? It calls into question the supposedly ‘inevitable’ outcome of the cosmic battle between good and evil.”
― Scott Davis Howard, Three Days and Two Knights

“So you truly believe in nothing?” she asked.
“No,” he coughed. “I don’t believe in anything—which isn’t the same as believing in nothing. Belief in nothing, it seems to me, takes quite as much faith as belief in something. I am utterly incapable of that kind of commitment.”
― Scott Davis Howard, Three Days and Two Knights

“At this point, he preferred his nightmares to being awake. Waking up meant caring about things like Morgana and magic. It meant the hamster wheel of tragedy was spinning, and it wouldn't stop until Arthur died--again.”
― Amy Rose Capetta

“Beside me, Matt reached for my barf bag with a green-tinged face. “These things are metal death contraptions.”

“Go find your own.” I swiped back the bag. As the plane pulled around to get in line for takeoff, I clutched the paper bag close.
”
― Priya Ardis, Gods of Merlin

“If he failed, it was with honor.
In his name we all dwell
in Camelot

Long after the towers fall,
and merlins nest
in the ruined stones.”
― Jane Yolen

“And is she happy? Does she see unmoved 
The days in which she might have liv'd and lov'd 
Slip without bringing bliss slowly away, 
One after one, to-morrow like to-day? 
Joy has not found her yet, nor ever will:— 
Is it this thought which makes her mien so still, 
Her features so fatigued, her eyes, though sweet, 
So sunk, so rarely lifted save to meet 
Her children's? She moves slow; her voice alone 
Has yet an infantine and silver tone, 
But even that comes languidly: in truth, 
She seems one dying in a mask of youth.

- Tristram and Iseult”
― Matthew Arnold, Selected Poems of Matthew Arnold: Volume I of II