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Grendel
Unlike Grendel, his mother neither speaks nor questions the world. She spends most of her time in her underground lair and generally experiences the world in a purely physical way. Similarly, she is only able to express any affection for Grendel through physical gestures. Grendel expresses disdain for his mother, but when he is danger he calls for her, and it is her that rescues him when he first encounters humans.
Grendel’s Mother Quotes in Grendel
The Grendel quotes below are all either spoken by Grendel’s Mother or refer to Grendel’s Mother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
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.
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Chapter 2
Quotes
I tried to tell her all that had happened, all that I’d come to understand: the meaningless objectness of the world, the universal bruteness. She only stared, troubled at my noise. She’d forgotten all language long ago, or maybe had never known any.
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Grendel’s Mother Quotes in Grendel
The Grendel quotes below are all either spoken by Grendel’s Mother or refer to Grendel’s Mother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
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.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2
Quotes
I tried to tell her all that had happened, all that I’d come to understand: the meaningless objectness of the world, the universal bruteness. She only stared, troubled at my noise. She’d forgotten all language long ago, or maybe had never known any.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
