Gladiator quotes

The chief obstacle to Mrs. Danner’s placid dominion of her hearth was Professor Danner’s laboratory, which occupied a room on the first floor of the house. It was the one impregnable redoubt in her domestic stronghold.

Neither threat nor entreaty would drive him and what she termed his “stinking, unchristian, unhealthy dinguses” from that room.

After he had lectured vaguely to his classes on the structure of the Paramecium caudatum and the law discovered by Mendel, he would shut the door behind himself, and all the fury of the stalwart, black-haired woman could not drive him out until his own …

It might attack a person, in which case he, Danner, would be guilty of murder. That day he did not attend his classes. Instead, he prepared a relentless poison in his laboratory and fed it to the kitten in a brace of meaty chops.

The dying agonies of Samson, aged seven weeks, were Homeric.

After that, Danner did nothing for some days. He wondered if his formulæ and processes should be given to the world. But, being primarily a man of vast imagination, he foresaw hundreds of rash experiments.

He’ll be the first of a new and glorious race. A race that doesn’t have to fear—because it cannot know harm. No man can hurt him, no man can vanquish him. He will be mightier than any circumstances.

He, son of a weak man, will be stronger than the beasts, even than the ancient dinosaurs, stronger than the tides, stronger than fate⁠—strong as God is strong.

And you—you, Matilda—mother of him, will be proud of him. He will be great and famous. You can knock me down. You can knock me down a thousand times. I have given you a son whose little finger you cannot bend with a crowbar.

She stared at the babe.

“Of course I love him. Wash your face, Abednego.”

After that there was peace in the house, and with it the child grew. During the next months they ignored his peculiarities. When they found him hanging outside his crib, they put him back gently.

“Well—” a blazing maternal instinct made her feel vicious. “Well—you won’t raise mine by a rod. Or touch it—by a mile. Here’s your hat, parson.” Mrs. Danner spent the next hour in prayer.

The village is known for the speed of its gossip and the sloth of its intelligence.

Those two factors explain the conditions which preluded and surrounded the dawn of consciousness in young Hugo. Mrs. Danner’s extemporaneous fabrication of a sturdy ancestral line kept the more supernatural elements of the baby’s prowess from the public eye.

He did not realize then that if he had been so minded, he could have turned on the blacksmith and whipped him, he could have broken the neck of the doctor, he could have run raging through the town and escaped unscathed.

His might was a secret from himself. He knew it only as a curse, like a disease or a blemish.

During the ensuing four or five years Hugo’s peculiar trait asserted itself but once. It was a year after his fight with the bully. He had been isolated socially. Even Anna Blake did not dare to tease him any longer.

“I guess I do. It’s hard work—doin’ all that.”

“The stronger, the greater, you are, the harder life is for you. And you’re the strongest of them all, Hugo.”

The heart of the ten-year-old boy burned and vibrated. “And what about God?” he asked.

“Oh.” There was a pause. “You aren’t an Indian, are you?” It was asked bluntly.

“Scotch Presbyterian for twenty generations.”

“Well, when you get through here, you’ll be full of Scotch and emptied of the Presbyterianism. Put the trunk down.”

“Scotch Presbyterian for twenty generations.”

“Well, when you get through here, you’ll be full of Scotch and emptied of the Presbyterianism. Put the trunk down.”

Their talk of women, of classes, of football, excited Hugo.

He knew only and knew but dimly that he would lift himself up again and go on, searching for some universal foe to match against his strength.

So pitiful to be a man! So Christ must have felt in Gethsemane.

“What the hell did you come over here for?”

What honour, when he was dead, to lie beneath a slab on which was punily graven some note of mighty accomplishment? Why could he not content himself with the food he ate, the sunshine, with wind in trees, and cold water, and a woman?

It was that sad and silly command within to transcend his vegetable self that made him human.

He tried to think about it bitterly: fool man, grown suddenly more conscious than the other beasts—how quickly he had become vain because of it and how that vanity led him forever onward!

When he saw the first early caravan of produce headed toward the market, he slowed to a walk. The sun came over a hill and sparkled on a billion drops of dew. A bird flew singing from his path.

Hugo Danner had fled beyond the gates of Webster.

A whistle blew. The ships were lining up in the order of their arrival for admission to the Panama Canal. Gatun loomed in the feeble sun of dawn. The anchor chain rumbled. The Katrina edged forward at half speed.

The sea. Blue, green, restless, ghost-ridden, driven in empty quarters by devils riding the wind, secretive, mysterious, making a last gigantic, primeval stand against the conquest of man, hemming and isolating the world, beautiful, horrible, dead god of ten thousand voices, universal incubator, universal grave.

The Katrina came to the islands in the South Pacific. Islands that issued from the water like green wreaths and seemed to float on it.

He took her hand.

“Loved it, darling. And now we’re going to war.”

“Ah!” she said, and, at the door: “Bonne chance!”

True conclusions? He meditated. What did it matter—agnosticism, atheism, pantheism—anything but the savage and anthropomorphic twaddle that had been doled out since the Israelites singled out Jehovah from among their many gods. He would not commit himself.

He would go back with his death to the place where he had been before he was born and feel no more regret than he had in that oblivious past.

Meanwhile he would fight! He moved restively and waited for Shayne with growing impatience.

Hugo lit a cigarette. His eyes moved up and down the shambles. At intervals of two yards a man, his helmet trickling rain, his clothes filthy, his face inscrutable. Shayne was there on sagging knees. Hugo could not understand why he had not been killed.

Hugo was learning about war.

He thought then that the task which he had set for himself was not altogether to his liking. There should be other and more important things for him to do. He did not like to slaughter individuals. The day passed like a cycle in hell.

“It is the truth—and I shall show you.”

Hugo looked around. Finally he walked over to the sentry at the flap of the tent and took his rifle.

The man squealed in protest. Hugo lifted him off the floor by the collar, shook him, and set him down.

Hugo trembled. He controlled his voice.

“Madam,” he replied, “it feels exactly like sticking your finger into a warm, steaming pile of cow-dung.”

“Oh!” she gasped. And he heard her repeat it again in the corridor.

Its predominant color scheme was black and red. It had a loud, pagan voice. It breathed fire.

It melted steel and rock and drank human sweat, with human blood for an occasional stimulant.

On every side of him were enormous buildings and woven between them a plaid of girders, cables, and tracks across which masses of machinery moved. Inside, Thor was hammering.

“You’d be hard to live with.”

“Because you’re so determined not to have an illusion.”

“Go on. Say it. I’m so determined to have one.”

Her frigidity was worse than any hysteria.

“It isn’t natural to be able to do things like that. It isn’t human.”

He swallowed; those words in that stifled intonation were very familiar. “I know it. I’m very strong.”

The old green house in the Connecticut hills had been a refuge; Roseanne had been a refuge. They were, both of them, peaceful and whimsical and they had seemed innocent of the capacity for great anguish.

Every man dreams of the season-changed countryside as an escape; every man dreams of a woman on whose broad breast he may rest, beneath whose tumbling hair and moth-like hands he may discover forgetfulness and freedom.

Some men are successful in a quest for those anodynes. Hugo could understand the sharp contours of one fact: because he was himself, such a quest would always end in failure. No woman lived who could assuage him;

Hugo realized at last that there was no place in his world for him. Tides and tempest, volcanoes and lightning, all other majestic vehemences of the universe had a purpose, but he had none.

Either because he was all those forces unnaturally locked in the body of a man, or because he was a giant compelled to stoop and pander to live at all among his feeble fellows, his anachronism was complete.

That much he perceived calmly. His tragedy lay in the lie he had told to his father:

Hugo had no friends.

One single individual whom he loved, whom he could have taken fully into his confidence, might, in a measure, have resolved his whole life. Yet so intense was the pressure that had conditioned him that he invariably retreated before the rare opportunities for such confidences.

One single individual whom he loved, whom he could have taken fully into his confidence, might, in a measure, have resolved his whole life. Yet so intense was the pressure that had conditioned him that he invariably retreated before the rare opportunities for such confidences.

He had known many persons well: his father and mother, Anna Blake, Lefty Foresman, Charlotte, Iris, Tom Shayne, Roseanne, even Skorvsky⁠—but none of them had known him.

His friendlessness was responsible for a melancholy yearning to remain with his kind. Having already determined to go away, he sought for a kind of compromise.