"But how are we to write it tonight if the thing doesn't even happen till tomorrow at the earliest?"
Everyone burst out laughing.
"You'll never manage publicity that way, Mark," said Feverstone. "You surely don't need to wait for a thing to happen before you tell the story of it!"
---"One other thing," continued the Director. "You will not misunderstand it if I exclude you from our council tonight."
"Of course not, Sir," said Jane, in fact misunderstanding it very much.
---“If you two quarrel much more,” said the Director, “I think I’ll make you marry one another.”
---The moment of Mark’s decision had passed by him without his noticing it.
---"Well answered," said the Stranger. "In my college it was thought that only two men in the world knew this. But as for my third question, no man knew the answer but myself. Who shall be Pendragon in the time when Saturn descends from his sphere? In what world did he learn war?"
"In the sphere of Venus I learned war," said Ransom. "In this age Lurga shall descend. I am the Pendragon."
---"The universe is so very complicated," said Dr. Dimble.
"So you have said rather often before, dear," replied Mrs. Dimble.
"Have I?" he said with a smile. "How often, I wonder? As often as you've told the story of the pony and trap at Dawlish?"
"Cecil! I haven't told it for years."
"My dear, I heard you telling it to Camilla the night before last."
"Oh, Camilla. That was quite different. She'd never heard it before."
"I don't know that we can be certain even about that . . . the universe being so complicated and all." For a few minutes there was silence between them.
---“A storm, or even a river-flood would be of little avail against our present enemy. Your weapon would break in your hands. For the Hideous Strength confronts us and it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven.”
---“And are we not big enough to meet them in plain battle?”
“We are four men, some women, and a bear.”
---As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else—something he vaguely called the "Normal"—apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was—solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment.
---When Mrs. Dimble had told her husband how she would be engaged that morning he had said, "Well, it can't take you very long just lighting a fire and making a bed." I share Dr. Dimble's sex and his limitation. I have no idea what the two women found to do in the Lodge for all the hours they spent there.
---"Well, what I say is, if it wasn't one thing it'd be something else. That's how I look at it. And it isn't as if they hadn't a lot to put up with too. Because they've sort of got to get married if they're the right sort, poor things, but, whatever we say, Jane, a woman takes a lot of living with. I don't mean what you'd call a bad woman. I remember one day—it was before you came—Mother Dimble was saying something to the Doctor; and there he was sitting reading something, you know the way he does, with his fingers under some of the pages and a pencil in his hand—not the way you or I'd read—and he just said, 'Yes dear,' and we both of us knew he hadn't been listening. And I said 'There you are, Mother Dimble,' said I, 'that's how they treat us once they're married. They don't even listen to what we say,' I said. And do you know what she said? 'Ivy Maggs.' said she, 'did it ever come into your mind to ask whether anyone could listen to all we say?' Those were her very words. Of course I wasn't going to give in to it, not before him, so I said, 'Yes, they could.' But it was a fair knock-out. You know often I've been talking to my husband for a long time and he's looked up and asked me what I've been saying and, do you know? I haven't been able to remember myself!"
---Words take too long. To be aware of all this and to know that it had gone made one single experience. It was revealed only in its departure. The largest thing that had ever happened to her had, apparently, found room for itself in a moment of time too short to be called time at all. Her hand closed on nothing but a memory.
---He stood aside, and the tramp, accompanied by the real Merlin and the Deputy Director, left the room.
---