How we cite our quotes: (Page) Vintage Books, 1989
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.