Dominique

“What he wanted was to live in a timeless castle, a world wrought of old gold, where everything was noble and glorious and nothing ever changed. He wanted the battle to be over, he wanted to win and have won and be done with fighting forever and ever. But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled one into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends. Till the Last Day, and maybe not even then. Who knows what stories they tell in Heaven.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Of all the animals,” she said, “only man can feel a despair that is beyond his power to endure.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“He couldn’t stop himself, it was like he craved humiliation, like he had a perverse compulsion to see the greatest in the land and to prove to himself and them and the whole world once and for all how definitively unworthy he really was.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“All boys need a father’s love, and they’ll do anything to get it, and Arthur had tried being good, and it hadn’t worked, so that left only greatness. Perfection. If only, if only Arthur had had a father there to say, it’s all right, this is good enough. You can stop now, I will love you whatever happens, whatever you do, whoever you are. But there was no one there to say it. God would never say stop. And so Arthur never would.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword