How we cite our quotes: (Page) Vintage Books, 1989
Quote #1
The sky says nothing, predictably. I make a face, uplift a defiant middle finger, and give an obscene little kick. The sky ignores me, forever unimpressed. Him too I hate, the same as I hate these brainless budding trees, those brattling birds. (6)
Grendel can't win: there's nothing in the world (or outside of it) that doesn't increase his misery. He gets no answer from any deity, no matter what the question. There's no purpose or end to his suffering and isolation. The brute beasts that exist without thinking, the endless changing of the seasons without the possibility of anything new—it's like living in a snow globe in the middle of a zoo with Kenny G piped in as your only entertainment.
Quote #2
I feel my anger coming back, building up like invisible fire, and at last, when my soul can no longer resist, I go up—as mechanical as anything else—fists clenched against my lack of will, my belly growling, mindless as wind, for blood. (9)
Self-hatred almost overshadows Grendel's disgust for humanity. He's the guy who stuffs himself on old ladies and little kids and then says, "See what you made me do?" That sense of being out of control, being driven by some unnamed thing (like the birds and the goats and the trees) makes Grendel's hatred that much stronger.
Quote #3
Behind my back, at the world's end, my pale slightly glowing fat mother sleeps on, old, sick at heart, in our dingy underground room. Life-bloated, baffled, long-suffering hag. Guilty, she imagines, of some unremembered, perhaps ancestral crime. (She must have some human in her.) Not that she thinks. Not that she dissects and ponders the dusty mechanical bits of her miserable life's curse. (11)
This is classic adolescent rejection of everything parental. In this case, though, Grendel may have a point. Mama really is a drag to hang around with, she can't keep house and she's really let herself go. What's worse? Grendel hates that she believes in the Shaper's version of their past—that they are a cursed race—and that she seems to feel bad about it. He also has a massive superiority complex when it comes to Mom, like he's the first kid who ever thought he was smarter than his parent.