How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Without warning Meg was swept into nothingness again. This time the nothingness was interrupted by a feeling of clammy coldness such as she had never felt before. The coldness deepened and swirled all about her and through her, and was filled with a new and strange kind of darkness that was a completely tangible thing, a thing that wanted to eat and digest her like some enormous malignant beast of prey. (6.68)
The digestion metaphor foreshadows what's going to happen on Camazotz – IT doesn't want to destroy the people around IT, but to incorporate them into itself. Why?
Quote #8
She teetered on the see-saw of love and hate, and the Black Thing pushed her down into hate. "You don't even know where we are!" she cried out at her father. "Well never see Mother or the twins again! We don't know where earth is! Or even where Camazotz is! We're lost out in space! What are you going to do!" She did not realize that she was as much in the power of the Black Thing as Charles Wallace. (10.67)
Meg's experience suggests that evil is not an all-or-nothing proposition – even though she didn't give in to IT, she's still touched by IT's evil. While on the one hand the materiality of the Black Thing as an entity that is located in specific places seems to divide the world into good and evil, Meg's crankiness suggests that matters are not so simple.
Quote #9
I hope I don't smell awful to it, she thought. But then she knew with a deep sense of comfort that even if she did smell awful the beasts would forgive her. As the tall figure cradled her she could feel the frigid stiffness of her body relaxing against it. This bliss could not come to her from a thing like IT. IT could only give pain, never relieve it. The beasts must be good. They had to be good. She sighed deeply, like a very small child, and suddenly she was asleep. (11.38)
Meg's morality at this moment is based in her senses – pain bad, pleasure good. And, in these circumstances, she's right. What else in the book supports or denies this approach to morality?