That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy #3)

by C.S. Lewis

Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.

He took the line that the one thing to consider is the type of man we need, and be damned to paper qualifications.

Then followed some minutes of conversation which was strictly feminine in the old-fashioned sense. Jane, while preserving a certain sense of superiority, found it indefinably comforting; and though Mrs. Dimble had really the wrong point of view about such things, there was no denying that the one small alteration which she suggested did go to the root of the matter.

“Do I hate being kissed?” thought Jane to herself. “That indeed is the question. Do I hate being kissed? Hope not for mind in women—” She had intended to reply, “Of course not,” but inexplicably, and to her great annoyance, found herself crying instead.

what would Arthur himself have been?” said Jane. It was silly that her heart should have missed a beat at the words “rather like Spanish.” “That’s just the point,” said Dr. Dimble. “One can imagine a man of the old British line, but also a Christian and a fully-trained general with Roman technique, trying to pull this whole society together and almost succeeding.

it is the main question at the moment: which side one’s on—obscurantism or Order.

You are what we need: a trained sociologist with a radically realistic outlook, not afraid of responsibility. Also, a sociologist who can write.” “You don’t mean you want me to write up all this?” “No. We want you to write it down—to camouflage it. Only for the present, of course. Once the thing gets going we shan’t have to bother about the great heart of the British public. We’ll make the great heart what we want it to be. But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put.

You musn’t experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the NICE and it’s all correct!”

what I dislike is one man being responsible for it when half the work is being done by someone else. As I said to him, you’ve now got three HD’s all tumbling over one another about some job that could really be done by a clerk. It’s becoming ridiculous.

It was certainly not the intention of the Progressive Element to elect mediocrities to fellowships, but their determination to elect “sound men” cruelly limited their field of choice

I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing.

his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw.

“They would say,” he answered, “that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”

If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer.”

“There’s always a motive, you know,” said she. “For anyone murdering anyone. The police are only human. When the machinery’s started they naturally want a conviction.”

Do you suppose I don’t know that you have control of every paper in the country except one? And that one has not appeared this morning. Its printers have gone on strike. The poor dupes say they will not print articles attacking the people’s Institute. Where the lies in all other papers come from you know better than I.”

He saw himself in his teens laboriously reading rubbishy grown-up novels and drinking beer when he really enjoyed John Buchan and stone ginger.

every advance in industry and agriculture reduces the number of work-people who are required. A large, unintelligent population is now becoming a deadweight.

“What we have here,” said Frost pointing to the sleeper, “is not, you see, something from the fifth century. It is the last vestige, surviving into the fifth century, of something much more remote. Something that comes down from long before the Great Disaster, even from before primitive druidism; something that takes us back to Numinor, to pre-glacial periods.”

Suddenly, like a thing that leaped to him across infinite distances with the speed of light, desire (salt, black, ravenous, unanswerable desire) took him by the throat.

Like a good many people, MacPhee imagines he’s a Celt when, apart from his name, there’s nothing Celtic about him any more than about Mr. Bultitude.

the Hideous Strength confronts us and it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven.”

there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight.

something he vaguely called the “Normal”—apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was—solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with.

He was choosing a side: the Normal. “All that,” as he called it, was what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from “all that,” then be damned to the scientific point of view!

You know often I’ve been talking to my husband for a long time and he’s looked up and asked me what I’ve been saying and, do you know? I haven’t been able to remember myself!”

she thought that “Religion” was a kind of exhalation or a cloud of incense, something steaming up from specially gifted souls towards a receptive Heaven. Then, quite sharply, it occurred to her that the Director never talked about Religion; nor did the Dimbles nor Camilla. They talked about God.

Christianity was nonsense, but one did not doubt that the man had lived and had been executed thus by the Belbury of those days. And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image, though not itself an image of the Straight or Normal, was yet in opposition to crooked Belbury.

a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight—what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross.

Supposing the Straight was utterly powerless, always and everywhere certain to be mocked, tortured, and finally killed by the Crooked, what then? Why not go down with the ship?

The trouble with these courts for young criminals nowadays is that they’re always binding them over when they ought to be bending them over.’

Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers; the home of Sidney—and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.”

Seeing people off is always folly. It’s neither good mirth nor good sorrow.”