## Metadata - Author: [[Lev Grossman]] - Full Title: The Bright Sword - Category: #books ## Highlights - This world was worn out and cold, its future was uncertain at best, but it could still play host to wonders. ([Location 4067](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CLKX49LX&location=4067)) - Guinevere’s marriage to Arthur had come with many surprises, but the biggest surprise of all was that they loved each other, as much as any man and wife, as much as any lovers in any story. She loved him more than he loved himself. And was that not the point of a marriage, to love a person more than they can love themselves? ([Location 5649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CLKX49LX&location=5649)) - Somehow Collum returned her steady gaze even though his heart was fluttering wildly around the room like a trapped seagull. She smiled, and he was intensely conscious of being alone with her in a bedchamber, in a castle, on a magic island lost somewhere in the vast Fairy Sea. By all possible standards of decorum and chivalry he shouldn’t have been here, it wasn’t proper at all, but decorum and chivalry seemed to have gotten lost in the Fairy Sea too. “I should go,” he said. “But I don’t want to.” “Then don’t.” ([Location 7707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CLKX49LX&location=7707)) - At Camelot, the heart of the heart of the world, something was wrong. All this merriment was a mere distraction, the hectic flush of a dying land. God had cursed Britain after all, he’d made it a waste land, only he’d kept it a secret. The land had died and been replaced by an empty husk of itself, indistinguishable from the original, as uncannily lifelike as a roasted swan with all its feathers, except that nothing meant anything, and everything was only what it was and nothing more. ([Location 8260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CLKX49LX&location=8260)) - The past was a cursed wound. No perfect knight would ever come to heal it as if it never happened. The best you could hope for was forgiveness. And even that was cold comfort. It was the future that required attention. Understanding was filling Arthur as if from a miraculous spring—in that moment he saw it all, the whole world, past and future, as no one else could. Britain was a wounded land, cloven in two, British and Roman, pagan and Christian, Stone and Grail, north and south, old and new. It was born in blood and grief and greed, divided eternally against itself, its different natures so mixed it could never extricate itself from itself. No miracle would erase that wound either. But Britain didn’t need a miracle, or a perfect knight, or even God. It would heal all on its own, slowly, the hard way. It would always be a scarred land, a complicated land, but complicated was not the same as broken. It would never be pure or perfect, but it might still one day be whole. How do you live in a waste land? Is there really any such thing? You look for the buried seeds and deep springs. You watch the animals, the lizards and the foxes, and see how they do it. You wait. ([Location 8418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CLKX49LX&location=8418)) - 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. ([Location 8969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CLKX49LX&location=8969))