That Hideous Strength
by
C. S. Lewis
The terror of this dream, like the terror of most dreams, evaporates in the telling, but it must be set down for the sake of what came afterwards. (pg. 14)
He was so accustomed to his position by now that this thought gave him the same curious sensation which a man has when he discovers that his father once very nearly married a different woman. (Pg. 19)
This is the sort of place which, as a child, one would have been rather afraid of or else would have liked very much indeed. But when alone--really alone---everyone is a child: or no one? Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives. (Pg. 21)
One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. (Pg. 29)
Has it ever stuck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He’s not evil; yet he’s a magician. He is obviously a druid; yet he knows all about the grail. He’s ‘the devil’s son’; but then Layamon goes out of his way to tell you that the kind of being who fathered Merlin needn’t have been bad at all. You remember, ‘There dwell in the sky many kinds of wights. Some of them are good, and some work evil.’ ... I often wonder whether Merlin doesn’t represent the last trace of something the later tradition has quite forgotten about--something that became impossible when the only people in touch with the supernatural were either white or black, either priests or sorcerers. (Pg. 31,32)
Total war is the most humane in the long run. (Pg. 35)
In order to keep the place going as a learned society, all the best brains in it have to give up doing anything about learning. (Pg. 36)
We have all known the kind of clergyman who tends to forget his clerical collar after the third glass; but his habit was the reverse. It was after the third glass that he began to remember his collar. (Pg. 37)
I should have thought the objectives of N.I.C.E were pretty clear. It’s the first attempt to take applied science seriously from a national point of view. The difference in scale between it and everything we’ve had before amounts to a difference in kind. Think what it has done already for industry. Think how it is going to mobilize all the talent of the country: and not only scientific talent in the narrower sense. (Pg. 37)
The N.I.C.E. marks the beginning of a new era--the really scientific era. Up to now, everything has been haphazard. This is going to put science itself on a scientific basis. (Pg. 38)
If science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn’t--well, we’re done. (Pg. 41)
If you try to be neutral you become simply a pawn. (Pg. 41)
Call it re-education of the mal-adjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end. Odd thing it is--the word ‘experiment’ is unpopular, but not the word ‘experimental.’ You mustn’t experiment on children, but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school and it’s all correct! (Pg. 43)
The reason you cannot be cured is that you’re not ill. (Pg. 64)
Vision is not a disease. (Pg. 66)
What had hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was. And if cure were humane and desirable, how much more prevention. (Pg. 69)
There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there is never more than one. (Pg. 72)
It’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and the corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything. (Pg. 99)
Any child loves rain if it’s allowed to go out and paddle about in it. (Pg. 113)
She had (or she had believed) disliked bearded faces except for old men with white hair. But that was because she had long since forgotten the imagined Arthur of her childhood--and the imagined Solomon too. Solomon--for the first time in many years the bright solar blend of king and lover and magician which hangs about that name stole back upon her mind. For the first time in all those years she tasted the word King itself with all links associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power. (Pg. 143)
The voice also seemed to be like sunlight and gold. Like gold, not only as gold is beautiful, but as it is heavy: like sunlight, not only as it falls gently on English walls in autumn but as it beats down on the jungle or the desert to engender life or destroy it. And now it was addressing her. (Pg. 143)
I’m not allowed to use desperate remedies until desperate diseases are really apparent. Otherwise we become just like our enemies--breaking all the rules whenever we imagine that it might possibly do some vague good to humanity in the remote future. (Pg. 145)
They would say that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience. (Pg. 147)
Equality before the law, equality of incomes--that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a blue-book. (Pg. 148)
With these words he broke the bread and poured himself out a glass of wine. (Pg. 149)
Beauty was made for others. (Pg. 152)
(Curdie reference) Pg. 163, 149
If everyone indulged in few opinions there’d be less silly talking and printing in the world. (pg. 166)
The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I’ve seen the civilized tree in Persia. It was a French man who had it because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal, poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminum. So natural it would even deceive... and consider the advantages! You get tired of it in one place: two workmen carry it somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and no mess. (Pg 172, 175)
Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away. (pg. 177)
The resurrection of Jesus in the Bible was a symbol: tonight you shall see what it symbolized. This is real Man at last, and it claims all our allegiance. ... our Head is the first of the New Men--the first that lives beyond animal life. As far as Nature is concerned, he is already dead: if Nature had her way, his brain would now be moldering in the grave. (Pg. 177)
All that talk about the power of Man over Nature--Man and the abstract--is only for the canaglia. You know as well as I do that Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as instrument. There is no such thing as Man--it is a word. There are only men. (Pg. 178)
Not since he had been bullied at school had he known what it was to hate and dread anyone with every nerve in his body as he now hated and dreaded this woman. (Pg. 186)
JANE: Isn’t seeing believing?
MaCPHEE: It may be--for children or beasts. (Pg. 193)(eldi reference) (pg. 201)
(materialism reference) (pg. 203)
Materialism is in fact no protection. Those who seek it in that hope will be disappointed. (pg. 205)
He was aware, without even having to think of it, that it was he himself--nothing else in the whole universe that had chosen the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places. (Pg. 247)
(Nice Description of color and wall) (Pg. 250)
On the one hand, anything like a lack of initiative or enterprise would be disastrous. On the other, the slightest approach to unauthorized action--anything which suggested that you were assuming a liberty of decision which, in all the circumstances, is not really yours--might have consequences from which even I could not protect you. (pg. 253)
Friendship is a chemical phenomenon; so is hatred. (Pg. 257)
Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. (Pg. 283)
Everything is getting more itself and more different from everything else all the time. Evolution means species getting less and less like one another. Minds get more and more spiritual, matter more and more material. Even in literature, poetry and prose draw further and further apart. (Pg. 284)
They have an engine call the Press whereby the people are deceived. (Pg. 292)
Motives are not the causes of action but its byproducts. You are merely wasting your time by considering them. When you have attained real objectivity you will recognize, not some motives, but all motives as merely animal, subjective epiphenomena. You will then have no motives and you will find that you do not need them. Their place will be supplied by something else which you will presently understand better than you do now. So far from being impoverished your action will become much more efficient. (Pg. 296)
As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. (Pg. 299)
Undeceiving was an activity wholly foreign to his mind. (Pg. 313)
(A God reference) (Pg. 318)
Both the humans trembled--Merlin because he did not know what was coming, Ransom because he knew. (pg. 323)
(Reference to the cross) (Pg. 336)
It was a picture of what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight. (pg. 336)
(Tower of Babel reference) (Pg. 344)
(Hmm) (pg. 367)
Your mistake is to think that the little regularities you have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unmistakable laws; whereas they are only the remote results which the true laws bring about more often than not; as a kind of accident. (pg. 368)
(Shakespeare reference) (Pg. 368)
He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same; how much less to saints, two nations, two angels. (pg. 370)