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Thus, skidding violently from one side to the other, his youth approached the moment at which he would begin to be a person.
The straight fight, after the long series of diplomatic failures, was tonic.
The picture of himself as hero and martyr, as Jack the Giant-Killer still coolly playing his hand even in the giant’s kitchen, rose up before him, promising that it could blot out forever those other, and unendurable pictures of himself which had haunted him for the last few hours.
It is idle to point out to the perverted man the horror of his perversion: while the fierce fit is on, that horror is the very spice of his craving. It is ugliness itself that becomes, in the end, the goal of his lechery; beauty has long since grown too weak a stimulant.
For the relics of such semisavage versions of Theism as Mark had picked up in the course of his life were stronger in him than he knew, and he felt, though he would not have put it into words, that it was “up to” the universe to reward his good resolutions.
very first moment you tried to be good, the universe let you down. It revealed gaps you had never dreamed of. It invented new laws for the express purpose of letting you down.
All that could in any sense be called himself went into that cry; and the dreadful consciousness of having played his last card began to turn slowly into a sort of peace.
Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.
Everything is getting more itself and more different from everything else all the time. Evolution means species getting less and less like one another.
For the Hideous Strength confronts us and it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven.”
Something civilized, or modern, or scholarly, or (of late) “spiritual” which did not want to possess her, which valued her for the odd collection of qualities she called “herself,” something without hands that gripped and without demands upon her.
