That Hideous Strength Quotes
"Mutual society, help, and comfort," said Jane bitterly. "In reality, marriage had proved to be the door out of a world of work and comradeship and laughter and innumerable things to do, into something like solitary confinement."
"I must get back my power of concentrating," said Jane.
"Man has got to take charge of man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest."
"I think," said Mark, "that James touched the important point when he said that it would have its own legal staff and its own police. I don't give a fig for Pragmatometers. The real thing is that this time we're going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past."
"You soon will. It sounds rather in Busby's style to say that humanity is at the cross-roads. But it is the main question at the moment: which side one's on—obscurantism or order."
"Pragmatometers-practical idealism," gasped Feverstone. "It really is rather devastating, that the people one has to use for getting things done should talk such drivel about the things themselves."
"If you do decide to go to anyone about that dream, I wish you would first consider going to someone whose address Margery or I will give you."
"This whole business, now, of bringing the N.I.C.E. to Edgestow. Think of the new life, The stirring of dormant impulses."
"If you've decided that I'm going mad you'd better get Brizeacre to come down and certify me." - Jane
"The only puzzle is why the N.I.C.E. should want that bit of land." - Hingest
"The Kingdom of God is to be realized here—in this world." - Mr. Straik
"We face these disorders with a firmness which will lead traducers to say that we have desired them." - Mr. Straik
"If I found chemistry beginning to fit in with a secret police run by a middle-aged virago who doesn't wear corsets and a scheme for taking away his farm and his shop and his children from every Englishman, I'd let chemistry go to the devil and take up gardening again." - Hingest
"The great thing here is never to quarrel with anyone." - Cosser
"Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer's boy, was the shadow."
"All the miracles... shadows of things to come."
"It is folly to talk of peaceful revolutions. Not that the canaglia would always resist - often they have to be prodded into it - but until there is the disturbance, the firing, the barricades - no one gets powers to act effectively."
"The old distrust of planned efficiency and the old jealousy of what is called 'Bureaucracy' can be so easily revived; but the will of the nation is behind this magnificent 'peace-effort'."
"The complexity of modern society rendered it an anachronism to confine the actual execution of the will of society to a body of men whose real function was the prevention and detection of crime."
"It wasn't as if he were taken in by them himself. He was writing with his tongue in his cheek—a phrase that somehow comforted him by making the whole thing appear like a practical joke."
"It was so dreary, as if she had slipped through a cleft in the present, down into some cold pit of the remote past."
"The slow journey through the fog almost sent her to sleep. She hardly thought about St. Anne's until she found herself there."
"Equality guards life; it doesn't make it. It is medicine, not food."
"You must excuse me, for impressing these points upon you. I am the only doctor in our company, and am responsible for protecting him as far as I can."
"She had, or so she had believed, disliked bearded faces except for old men. But that was because she had long since forgotten the imagined Arthur of her childhood."
"How could she have thought him young? Or old either? It came over her that this face was of no age at all."
"The whole inner debate became indistinct and flowed over into the larger experience of the fourth Jane, who was Jane herself."
"This fourth and supreme Jane was simply in the state of joy."
"No one has ever told you that obedience—humility—is an erotic necessity."
"Equality is not the deepest thing, you know."
"There is a world for you, no? There is cleanness, purity. Thousands of square miles of polished rock with not one blade of grass, not one fibre of lichen, not one grain of dust. Not even air."
"They do not need to be born and breed and die; only their common people, their canaglia do that. The Masters live on. They retain their intelligence: they can keep it artificially alive after the organic body has been dispensed with—a miracle of applied biochemistry."
"It is for the conquest of death; or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing."
"Man's power over Nature means the power of some men over other men, with Nature as the instrument."
"Don't you see that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty?"
"All day the wind had been rising, and they found themselves looking out on a sky swept almost clean. The air was intensely cold; the stars severe and bright."
"You never chose me. I never chose you. You and I have not started or devised this: it has descended on us."
"The very experiences of the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of deep-set repugnancies was the first essential for progress."
"And now all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power."
"Those who know best were never fully agreed as to the explanation of this episode."
"It took him a long time to get to the crossroads by the pub, where he could find a glazed and framed timetable of buses."
"He went in and ordered a pint and some bread and cheese."
"They tell me there were two hundred arrests yesterday."
"They're hard cases those N.I.C.E. police, every one of them."
"Would Jane be in? He felt he could not bear it if Jane should not be in."
"Why the hell hadn't Jane told him she was going away?"
"They'd probably asked Jane to stay with them. Been interfering somehow, no doubt."
"The idea of being annoyed with the Dimbles occurred to Mark almost as an inspiration."
"If you have any regard for your wife's safety you will not ask me to tell you where she has gone."
"I can only hope that you have no power in the N.I.C.E. at all."
"Even if I do happen to hold a job in the N.I.C.E. for the moment, you know me."
"I have no conception of your aims or motives."
"Am I some sort of leper or criminal that I can't even be trusted to know her address?"
"You are a member of the N.I.C.E. who have already insulted, tortured, and arrested her."
"The language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon."
"The most important part. That was where I found him-Merlin, you know."
"Because it now appeared that almost anything might be true. One might be in for anything. Maleldil might be, quite simply and crudely, God."
"Who's Who had fallen off the table, swept on to the floor as, with sudden, swift convulsive movement, the two old men lurched forward towards each other."
"A face without expression; the real man was far away."
"His inmost self was free to pursue its own life."
"A detachment of the spirit not only from the senses but even from the reason."
"His eyes were not shut. The face had no expression; the real man was far away, suffering, enjoying, or inflicting whatever such souls do suffer, enjoy, or inflict when the cord that binds them to the natural order is stretched out to its utmost."
"Something had been smashed-up there quite recently. It looked as if it had been done by explosives."
"You were right, Mr. Stone, in thinking that anything remotely resembling inquisitiveness on your part might have the most disastrous consequences."
"On the one hand, anything like a lack of initiative or enterprise would be disastrous. On the other, the slightest approach to unauthorised action might have consequences from which even I could not protect you."
"You are in danger, but you are also within reach of a great opportunity."
"Resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to one another are chemical phenomena."
"The real causes of all the principal events are quite unknown to the historians."
"It is a saddening reflection that someone so well endowed by nature should be, through no fault of his own, entirely unaware of the deeper significance of his surroundings."
"It was too obvious that the Sleeper was taking no notice of what he said."
"Life's business being just the terrible choice."
"Good is always getting better and bad getting worse: the possibilities of neutrality are always diminishing."
"Everything is getting more different from everything else."
"Through me, you can suck up from the Earth oblivion of all pains."
"No power that is merely earthly will serve against the Hideous Strength."
"If men by enginery and natural philosophy learn to fly into the Heavens, and come, in the flesh, among the heavenly powers and trouble them, He has not forbidden the Powers to react."
"Maleldil may have made it a law not to send down the Powers. But if men...trouble them, He has not forbidden the Powers to react."
"For now there was one man in the world-even myself-who was known to the Oyeresu and spoke their tongue."
"There is no escape. If it were a virginal rejection of the male, He would allow it."
"The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape."
"In its light you could understand them; but from them, you could know nothing of it."
"This demand which now pressed upon her was not, even by analogy, like any other demand."
"There was no form nor sound. The mould under the bushes, the moss on the path, and the little brick border were not visibly changed. But they were changed."
"Quick agitation seized them: a kind of boiling and bubbling in mind and heart which shook their bodies also."
"He found himself sitting within the very heart of language, in the white-hot furnace of essential speech."
"She could hardly bear to look on them: not through envy (that thought was far away) but because a sort of brightness flowed from them that dazzled her."
"Tears ran down Ransom's cheeks. He alone knew from what seas and what islands that breeze blew."
"Under the immense weight of their obedience their wills stood up straight and untiring like caryatides."
"I wouldn't be easy in my grave if I knew they'd won and I'd never had my hands on them."
"It was a mountain of centuries sloping up from the highest antiquity we can conceive, up and up like a mountain whose summit never comes into sight."
"It was like the first beginning of music in the halls of some king so high and at some festival so solemn that a tremor akin to fear runs through young hearts when they hear it."
"Christianity was nonsense, but one did not doubt that the man had lived and had been executed thus by the Belbury of those days."
"It was a picture of what happened when the Crooked met the Straight-what would happen to him if he remained straight."
"It is not to be supposed that even now none of the company kept their heads."
"With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless terror is just about to begin and yet unable to feel terrified, he watches while the last links with joy and reason are severed."
"Sorrow such as only animals know-huge seas of disconsolate emotion with not one little raft of reason to float on-drowned him fathoms deep."
"They that have despised the Word of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away."
"Every people has its own haunter. There's no nonsense about a chosen nation."
"We speak about Logres because it is our haunting, the one we know about."
"He doesn't make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels."