Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Malory

Malory drops us into motion mid-stride: "King Pellinore that time followed the questing beast". The sentence is almost aggressively plain, a chronicle note that refuses to glamorize what it reports. That bareness is the trick. By treating an absurdly mythical pursuit as routine business, Malory makes the Arthurian world feel less like fantasy and more like a lived-in political ecosystem where kings can be ridiculous and still be kings.

The phrase "that time" is doing quiet work. It implies Pellinore has done this before, will do it again, and that his life can be indexed by recurring chases rather than meaningful endpoints. The Questing Beast itself is famously uncatchable, more omen than animal, and Malory’s matter-of-fact syntax turns a metaphysical riddle into an administrative errand. Subtext: chivalric ambition is often indistinguishable from compulsion. The pursuit is not heroic because it is noble; it is "noble" because a king is pursuing it, and the culture has decided to call that virtue.

Context matters: Le Morte d'Arthur is stitched from older French and English romances, but Malory writes in the shadow of civil war, when the idea of stable kingship was more wish than reality. Pellinore’s chase reads like a sideways comment on leadership-as-activity: the court’s energies get poured into quests that generate story, distraction, and status, while the beast remains permanently out ahead. Malory’s economy makes the satire sharper: the legend is powered by forward movement, not by arrival.