Kathleen’s Reviews > The Once and Future King > Status Update

I've set this aside too long now. Will continue my re-read in the new year!

The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys, throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.

Arthur was a young man, just on the threshold of life. he had fair hair and a stupid face, or at any rate there was a lack of cunning in it. It was an open face, with kind eyes and a reliable or faithful expression, as though he were a good learner who enjoyed being alive and did not believe in original sin ... Merlyn had a white beard which reached to his middle, horn-rimmed spectacles, and a conical hat.

It was Christmas night in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage, and all around the castle the snow...hung heavily on the battlements, like thick icing on a very good cake and...turned itself into the clearest icicles of the greatest possible length...There was skating on the moat, which roared with the gliding bones which they used for skates, while hot chestnuts and spiced mead were served on the bank to all and sundry.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I always wanted to be the Dog Boy. "In Sir Ector's kennel there was a special boy, called the Dog Boy, who lived with the hounds day and night. He was a sort of head hound, and it was his business to take them out every day for walks, to pull thorns out of their feet, keep cankers out of their ears ... arbitrate in their quarrels and to sleep curled up among them at night."

From the minute the governess gets muddled with her astrolabe, I fall yet again, wholly and joyfully, under the spell of this favorite book.