How we cite our quotes: (Page) Vintage Books, 1989
Quote #1
But deer, like rabbits and bears and even men, can make, concerning my race, no delicate distinctions. That is their happiness: they see all life without observing it. They're buried like crabs in mud. Except men, of course. (8)
From the moment Grendel encounters mankind, he knows there is something special about them. They not only experience what's around them through their senses—they can interpret things, and think and plan. It makes them utterly terrifying to the young monster.
This also puts him between a rock and a hard place, so to speak. He may be furry, huge and beastlike, but Grendel has a greater affinity with human beings than he does with goats and deer. In short, he just doesn't fit in anywhere he goes. And that makes for one giant identity crisis.
Quote #2
I understood that the world was nothing; a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe blink by blink... (22)
Baby Grendel is having a real philosophical epiphany here. Actually, he's having several. First, he gets the sense that existence and suffering are purposeless. Then—and totally appropriately for a young creature—he signs himself up as a solipsist. This philosophy says that physical objects don't exist outside of the mind that perceives them. Perhaps it's a defense mechanism for the trapped monster: it gives him a sense of control in the bad situation that is his life.
Quote #3
"The essence of life is to be found in the frustrations of established order. The universe refuses the deadening influence of complete conformity." (67)
The dragon blabbers on about a lot of stuff, but this is about the most coherent that he ever gets. It's clear that he believes in chaos—that the universe and all alive in it evolves through a series of accidents and mishaps. It's a way of life, the dragon insists. He warns Grendel to stop thinking of himself as particularly important or destined in some way. We're all just "pointless accident."
Quote #4
"In a billion billion billion years, everything will have come and gone several times, in various forms. Even I will be gone. A certain man will absurdly kill me. A terrible pity—loss of a remarkable form of life. Conservationists will how." He chuckled. "Meaningless, however..." (70)
Compared to the coolness of the dragon (ironic, we know), Grendel seems like a whining, emotional disaster. But consider this: though the dragon can speak dispassionately about the bare facts of existence, Gardner makes it pretty clear that this may not be the best way to go. After all, the best the dragon can do is to sit on a stack of gold and count it.
Quote #5
"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." (71)
Dragons are mighty good at seeing the "long view" of things, mostly because they're traditionally given the ability to see all parts of the cosmic timeline. He uses his sight of the future to let Grendel in on a little secret: nothing really matters. The stuff that seems to matter (Grendel's life, his relationship with humanity) is nothing but a cosmic accident, and it will end in an equally stupid and meaningless way. Grendel can't bring himself to believe this until the moment he's staring death in the face.
Quote #6
"You improve them, my boy! Can't you see that for yourself? You stimulate them. You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last..." (73)
The dragon has a unique approach to Grendel's problem of identity and purpose. First, he tells the frightened monster to scrap his ideas of "destiny" and "the great scheme of things"—there's no such nonsense in this world. Next, Grendel has to choose a role for himself—any role will do. In the end, says the dragon, you might as well do what you're good at (like scaring the beejeebers out of human beings). The evil that he might do in that role will at least help humans define themselves in positive ways.
Quote #7
"Such is His mystery: that beauty requires contrast, and that discord is fundamental to the creation of new intensities of feeling. Ultimate wisdom, I have come to perceive, lies in the perception that the solemnity and grandeur of the universe rise through the slow process of unification in which the diversities of existence are utilized, and nothing, nothing is lost." (133)
The old priest Ork is on a roll here, driving himself to holy ecstasies with his creative ideas about the "Great Destroyer." Grendel thought it would be a good time to pick on the blind man by pretending to be the chiefest of all the gods, but now the joke's on him: Ork lays some major theology on the cynical monster.
The problem? Ork's ideas are clever enough to walk around on their own legs. Grendel finds himself a little uncomfortable by how well Ork is doing and by how plausible the whole rant sounds.
Quote #8
... Now that the Shaper is dead, strange thoughts come over me. I think of the pastness of the past: how the moment I am alive in, prisoned in, moves like a slowly tumbling form through darkness, the underground river. Not only ancient history—the mythical age of the brothers' feud—but my own history one second ago, has vanished utterly, dropped out of existence. (146)
Grendel spends almost every moment worried about his ultimate annihilation—as promised by the dragon. Here, he basically realizes that "what's done is done." He can't go back and kill the Shaper as he'd like to. He can't un-eat that sour old lady he snacked on the day before. Time is doing something pretty horrifying: constantly and continuously eating up the breadcrumb trail of his life on earth.
Quote #9
All order, I've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal—a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world—two snakepits. The watchful mind lies, cunning and swift, about the dark blood's lust, lies and lies and lies until, wary of talk, the watchman sleeps. Then sudden and swift the enemy strikes from nowhere, the cavernous heart. (157)
The Shaper's version of history, Ork's ideas about God, the dragon's understanding of life, Grendel's theories about his power over the world: all of it is like a great interface on a computer. It's that thing that keeps you from tumbling head over heels into an incomprehensible world of zeros and ones—a dark and scary place—and helps you make sense of stuff you'll never understand.
The different philosophies of life in Grendel's world are also a kind of illusion, but if these philosophies are an illusion, they also seem necessary to make life livable—at least until something comes to destroy the tidy version of the universe they've all created.
Quote #10
I saw long ago the whole universe as not-my-mother, and I glimpsed my place in it, a hole. Yet I exist, I knew. Then I alone exist, I said. It's me or it. What glee, that glorious recognition!... For even my mama loves me not for myself, my holy specialness (he he ho ha), but for my son-ness, my possessedness, my displacement of air as visible proof of her power. (158)
Grendel finds himself coming up against his old philosophical questions as he leaves his cave for the last time. He's still grasping for an idea about his place in the world, his identity, what he's meant to do. Yeah, sure, he's met with the dragon and had his rude awakening about the randomness of the universe and his lack of "specialness"—but he still feels there's something to his ideas about how he controls the world through his own perception of it.
Wait till he runs up against Beowulf.