Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord Quotes
The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man's own gift of speed against him.
I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed.
In the heir's world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.
He said that the music—its order and precision—helped him find the patterns in things—the way through the confusion of events and opinions to direction, to order, and beyond, to inspiration.
David set me to learn other skills, too, in those days of restless waiting.
It's remarkable how very many things there are that a king may not do.
He did wrong. He has acknowledged it before the people. He repents it. How many kings have the humility to do that?
It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.
I liked to be off by myself, away from the eyes of adults who always had some task or errand to demand of an unoccupied child.
David would wear no purple cloth, no symbols of his kingship, when he went to greet the ark. In its presence, we were all of us servants.
He found his voice in the silences, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it.
I have lived most of my life in soldiers’ camps. I know what they saw. I know how they think. Their confidence sours as sudden as curdled milk.
Where was his empathy? Buried, I supposed, beneath his self-regard.
the greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person.
Curiosity – if not desire, if not plain kindness – might have led him to greater zeal.
The stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip.
If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns.
David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic.
He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things.
This night he was a king before he was a man. At this time, this troubled me. Later, I would have cause to wish it were always so.
No one sits, as you do, so close to a king, who does not begin to grasp how the levers of power work, and the cost of the oil that must grease them.
When a kingdom rests on it, I always expect difficulty. Then, if there is none, no blame. But if there is, one is prepared.
Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand.
Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.
I thought it best to add nothing further, to let the line of his thought lead him to his own conclusions.
