RESTORATION by DT-Besotted

Merivel: They come in bleeding, broken, suffering, stinking -- every color of disease, green being the most disgusting, and I am revolted. I am frightened.
Father: Of what?
Merivel: Their faith and my ignorance.....

Merivel: Gifts? ... Yes, my gifts. My first patient was a frog. I cured him of jumping. Now I can cure people of breathing. My gifts, father, bring me to dark despair... Our King is restored to us, the theatres are open, wigmakers are happy as whores, and rich men go to heaven again!
Father: Take the hand of your friend Pearce, Robert. He is the example to follow. He may dress like a crow, but he once infected himself with scarlet fever, the better to study the disease.
Merivel: Oh, in my own small way I do the same for the clap.

Man with the open chest: I'm beyond fear, sir... are you?

Merivel: I am Thelonious, King of the Winds. [brrrrp]

Pearce: Don't you see? ... The light has gone out of your eyes.

Pearce: You have a gift for healing, Merivel.

Merivel: I want bright things, decorative things. I am, after all, a creature of the new age.
Pearce: I shall pray for you.

Finn: It is an excrescence... You must not show this painting to anyone. You must, I think, burn it.

Merivel: A commission?! Ahh. From whom? Robin Hood?
Finn: Oh yes, my Lincoln green. Nh nh nh nh. How funny.

King Charles: The Royal Tool is waving about in search of her.

Merivel: He is a slow painter, Your Majesty. What is a painting without cherubs?

Merivel: My dear Finch.
Finn: FINN!
Merivel: Ah. He has no interest, it seems, in the painting, but for his continuing suspicion of cherubs.
Finn: We are all mere pawns.
Merivel: Prawns, yes.
Finn: N-no. Pawns! PAWNS!

King Charles: I liked you for your skills. For then the two [skill and foolishness] were in you --light and dark. Now your skill has fallen away and you are one foolish quivering mass.

Some vital part of you appears to be asleep.

Merivel: I must restrain my farts and do something altogether more constructive.

Sign at the door of Pearce's hospital: "Behold I have refined thee in the furnace of affliction."

Merivel: Might that not be despair?

Merivel: Across the sea in the Land of Mar, there is a valley where are kept all the things on earth: lost kingdoms, lost riches, lost hours, lost loves. The people go there to discover their lost days and lost deeds... and often they are surprised to come across their lost wits... simply because they never in the least missed them.

Pearce: Only Jesus cures; we are merely his agents.

Merivel: There was a time before when there was no madness in them.

Merivel: May we not as his agents turn to ourselves, to our experience for a cure?

Merivel: We might discover the imprint of the steps to their madness. There, just under the surface, there can be cures by dancing and laughter...

Merivel: I see, I see, all the things lost on earth.....But you cannot banish joy, for that is the road to madness ... and all this has come to me from the Lord....I suspect.

Pearce: What I do remember is how I witnessed the beating heart.
Merivel: Yes, I remember.
Pearce: You put your hand in and touched it, but I could not.
Merivel: I remember.
Pearce: And the other man felt nothing. Pray for me that I become that man and feel no pain
Merivel: Be with me now, Pearce.

She was the bravest spirit I ever knew.
The most compassionate was my friend John Pearce.

Merivel: The stars that once confused me seem now to light a path that, it is clear, I have in truth, been traveling all these days, where I met what came and have left behind my sorrows... and am traveling still.