PL quotes

Lewis, C.S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

1.       In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and dance, he could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige.  P.96

2.       A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers – including even his power to revolt. P. 96

3.       What we see in Satan is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything. P.99

4.       Heaven understand Hell and Hell does not understand Heaven. P.101

5.       Satan is already wilting under the doom of Nonsense – that his brain is already in process of decay. P.79

Waldock, A. J. A. “Satan and the Technique of Degradation.” Milton Paradise Lost: A Collection of Critical Essays. Louis L. Martz. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc., 1966.

6.       Each great speech lifts Satan a little beyond what Milton really intended. P.86

7.       Satan’s character as made up of aesthetically harmonious qualities – of qualities that match.       P. 85

8.       In a true Hell, the damned have come to the end of their road. P. 96

9.       Each of them is like a man who has just sold his country or his friend and now knows himself to be a pariah. P101

Bush, Douglass. “Characters and Drama.” Milton Paradise Lost: A Collection of Critical Essays. Louis L. Martz. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc., 1966.

10.   Satan would certainly have been an ineffectual villain if he had not had magnetism enough to sway a host of followers. P. 111

11.   Satan sees only a conflict between himself, the world conqueror, and a temporarily superior force; he cannot see that it is a conflict between good and evil. P. 114

Steadman, John M. “Satan and Oratory.” John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Bloom’s Notes. Ed. Harold Bloom. Broomall, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996.

12.   His fall is itself a visible and tangible sign of his degradation in more than one respect: political and moral, physical and metaphysical. P. 67

13.   Satan is already degraded for the moment he first makes his appearance, even though he does his best to disguise the fact from his fellows and himself. P. 67

14.   Satan as orator – as rhetorician and as sophist – is just as heroic as the earlier portrait of Satan as martial combatant. P. 68

15.   Satanic heroism is….the perversion of all heroic values that we have admired. P. 65