Mervyn Peake quotes

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. (Mervyn Peake)
Each day I live in a glass room Unless I break it with the thrusting Of my senses and pass through The splintered walls to the great landscape.
Mervyn Peake
It was not certain what significance the ceremony held, for unfortunately the records were lost, but the formality was no less sacred for being unintelligible.
Mervyn Peake
To live at all is miracle enough.
Mervyn Peake
There is a kind of laughter that sickens the soul. Laughter when it is out of control: when it screams and stamps its feet, and sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter in all its ignorance and cruelty. Laughter with the seed of Satan in it. It tramples upon shrines; the belly-roarer. It roars, it yells, it is delirious: and yet it is as cold as ice. It has no humour. It is naked noise and naked malice.
Mervyn Peake
What is Time, O sister of similar features, that you speak of it so subserviently? Are we to be the slaves of the sun, that secondhand, overrated knob of gilt, or of his sister, that fatuous circle of silver paper? A curse upon their ridiculous dictatorship!
Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age.
Mervyn Peake
You have a rough manner,” said Titus. "But you have saved me twice. Why are you helping me?” "I have no idea,” said Muzzlehatch. "There must be something wrong with my brain.
Mervyn Peake
O'er seas that have no beaches To end their waves upon, I floated with twelve peaches, A sofa and a swan.
Mervyn Peake
There is something about a swarm that is damaging to the pride of its individual members.
Mervyn Peake
If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing-flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it. (Mervyn Peake)
He knew that he was caught up in one of those stretches of time when for anything to happen normally would be abnormal. The dawn was too tense and highly charged for any common happening to survive.
Mervyn Peake
The tremendous gulf between the sexes yawned-and an abyss, terrifying and thrilling, sheer and black as the arbour in which they sat; a darkness wide, dangerous, imponderable and littered with the wrecks of broken bridges.
Mervyn Peake
How merciful a thing is man's ignorance of his immediate future! What a ghastly, paralysing thing it would have been if all those present could have known what was about to happen within a matter of seconds!
Mervyn Peake
This upstart, this dangerous, unprecedented upstart, whose pursuit of the doctrines was propelled by a greed for personal power as cold as it was tameless.
Mervyn Peake
Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracks. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river.
Mervyn Peake
The walls of Gormenghast were like the walls of paradise or the walls of an inferno. The colours were devilish or angelical according to the colour of the mind that watched them. They swam, those walls, with the hues of hell, with the tints of Zion. The breasts of the plumaged seraphim; the scales of Satan.
Mervyn Peake
Through honeycombs of stone would now be wandering the passions in their clay. There would be tears and there would be strange laughter. Fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings. And dreams, and violence, and disenchantment.
Mervyn Peake
Autumn returned to Gormenghast like a dark spirit re-entering its stronghold.
Mervyn Peake
What had happened? As he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. That no one had thought fit to tell him! No one! It was a bitter pill for him to swallow. He had been forgotten. Yet he had always wished to be forgotten. He could not have it both ways.
Mervyn Peake
"She thinks she's a lady.” And then he grinned until the very lake seemed to be in danger of engulfment. "Oh, dear!” the poor thing. Tries so hard, and the more she tries, the less she is. Ha! ha! ha! Take it from me, Fuchsia dear, The only ladies are those to whom the idea of whether they are or not never occurs. Her blood's all right-Irma's-same as mine, ha, ha, ha! but it doesn't go by blood. It's equipoise, my Gipsy, equipoise that does it-with a bucketful of tolerance thrown in. (Mervyn Peake)
He also knew when to stop. In the fine art of deceit and personal advancement as in any other calling this is the hallmark of the master.
Mervyn Peake
What was important, now, with her eyes bent upon him, and the shadow of a branch trembling across her breast, was the immemorial game of love: no less a game for being grave. No less grave for being wild. Grave as a great green sky. Grave as a surgeon's knife.
Mervyn Peake
Drear ritual turned its wheel.
Mervyn Peake
These days a passion to accumulate knowledge of any and every kind consumed him; but only as a means to an end. He must know all things, for only so might he have, when situations arose in the future, a full pack of cards to play from.
Mervyn Peake