Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord
37 quotes
"I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature."
"As wars dwindled to skirmishes and our strength grew, so David was able to spend less time with military commanders and more with the engineers and overseers who were fanning out throughout the land, digging cisterns, making roads, fortifying, connecting, and generally making a nation out of our scattered people."
"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."
"I thought it best to add nothing further, to let the line of his thought lead him to his own conclusions."
"Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself."
"Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand."
"When a kingdom rests on it, I always expect difficulty. Then, if there is none, no blame. But if there is, one is prepared."
"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."
"David was at his best in group settings, soldier enough to join in the raucous jests, king enough to make it matter that he remembered some moments of bravery or sacrifice, and praised each man accordingly."
"He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things."
"David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic."
"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."
"The stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip."
"One did not need to penetrate David's secret counsels or insinuate a man in his bodyguard. All one needed was a pair of years and access to the royal precincts. Just to eavesdrop upon his singing was to develop an accurate idea of his state of mind."
"Curiosity – if not desire, if not plain kindness – might have led him to greater zeal."
"David set me to learn other skills, too, in those days of restless waiting."
"the greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person."
"I understood that I was being shown the future: shards of what would come to be. Often, I cried out for the pain of it. But other times, I was comforted, because I saw, for an instant, the pattern of the whole."
"Where was his empathy? Buried, I supposed, beneath his self-regard."
"The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man's own gift of speed against him."
"We look at the Ark of the Covenant and remember who we are."