Grendel
John Gardner
Top 10 Best Quotes
“When I was a child I truly loved: Unthinking love as calm and deep As the North Sea. But I have lived, And now I do not sleep.”
“Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.”
“Find a pile of gold and sit on it.”
“So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.”
“The world is all pointless accident... I exist, nothing else.”
“I know everything, you see,' the old voice wheedled. 'The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and perception. But dragons, my boy, have a whole different kind of mind.' He stretched his mouth in a kind of smile, no trace of pleasure in it. 'We are from the mountaintop: all time, all space. We see in one instant the passionate vision and the blowout.”
“Stars, spattered out through lifeless night from end to end, like jewels scattered in a dead king's grave, tease, torment my wits toward meaningful patterns that do not exist.”
“Pick an apocalypse, any apocalypse. A sea of black oil and dead things. No wind. No light. Nothing stirring, not even an ant, a spider. A silent universe. Such is the end of the flicker of time, the brief hot fuse of events and ideas set off, accidentally, and snuffed out, accidentally, by man. Not a real ending of course, nor even a beginning. Mere ripple in Time's stream.”
“I know what's in your mind. I know everything. That's what makes me so sick and old and tired.”
“He had glimpsed a glorious ideal, had struggled toward it and seized it and come to understand it, and was disappointed. One could sympathize.”
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Book Keywords:
knowledge, childhood, dragon, experience, idealism, love, words, grendel, existential, life, fantasy, disappointment, inspirational, maturity, beowulf, dragons, introspection
