Mervyn Peake quotes:

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.

Why break the heart that never beat from love?

She had shown him by her independence how it was only fear that held people together. The fear of being alone and the fear of being different.

This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

He had no longer any need for home, for he carried his Gormenghast within him. All that he sought was jostling within himself. He had grown up. What a boy had set out to seek a man had found, found by the act of living.

And there shall be a flame-green daybreak soon. And love itself will cry for insurrection! For tomorrow is also a day - and Titus has entered his stronghold.

His was not the hatred that arises suddenly like a storm and as suddenly abates. It was, once the initial shock of anger and pain was over, a calculated thing that grew in a bloodless way.

The moon slid inexorably into its zenith, the shadows shrivelling to the feet of all that cast them, and as Rantel approached the hollow at the hem of the Twisted Woods he was treading in a pool of his own midnight.

And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?

Oh how I hate people!

I am too rich already, for my eyes mint gold.- Coloured Money

In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.

Each day we live is a glass roomUntil we break it with the thrustingOf the spirit and pass throughThe splintered walls to the green pasturesWhere the birds and buds are breakingInto fabulous song and hueBy the still waters.- Each Day We Live is a Glass Room

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 it s Outer Walls.

But haven't all ambitious people something of the monstrous about them? You, sir, for instance, if you will forgive me, are a little bit monstrous.

He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.

There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.

The crumbling castle, looming among the mists, exhaled the season, and every cold stone breathed it out. The tortured trees by the dark lake burned and dripped, their leaves snatched by the wind were whirled in wild circles through the towers. The clouds mouldered as they lay coiled, or shifted themselves uneasily upon the stone skyfield, sending up wreathes that drifted through the turrets and swarmed up hidden walls.

Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.

If seeing her an hour before her lastWeak cough into all blackness I could yetBe held by chalk-white walls- The Consumptive. Belsen 1945

[Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.

What is Time... That you speak of it so subserviently? Are we to be the slaves of the sun, that second-hand, overrated knob of gilt, or of his sister, that fatuous circle of silver paper? A curse upon their ridiculous dictatorship!

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! For nothing short of pre-knowledge could have stopped the occurrence, so suddenly it sprang upon them.

To live at all is miracle enough.

She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.

It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others.

And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them~?

As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.

Cold love's the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized.

Countless candles dribbled with hot wax, and their flames, like little flags, fluttered in the unchartered currents of air. Thousands of lamps, naked, or shuttered behind coloured glass, burned with their glows of purple, amber, grass-green, blue, blood red and even grey. The walls of Gormenghast were like the walls of paradise or like 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.

For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless.

For what use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook's nest with every twig a duty.

I am the wilderness lost in man.

I want a lot to eat, I'm going to think today.

I was brooding, boy. Than which there is no richer pastime. It muffles one with rotting plumes. It gives forth sullen music. It is the smell of home.

It was not certain what significance the ceremony held... but the formality was no less sacred for it being unintelligible

Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.

Mount and begone. The world awaits you.

Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.

Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one's face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.

Something to remember, that: cats for missiles.

The Earth swirls down through the ominous moons of preconsidered generations.

The sun sank with a sob and darkness waded in from all horizons so that the sky contracted and there was no more light left in the world, when, at this very moment of annihilation, the moon, as though she had been waiting for her cue, sailed up the night.

There is a brotherhood among the kindly- Closer and defter and more integral- Than any of aisle or coven- For love rang out before the chapel bell

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 humor. It is naked noise and naked malice.

Through her, in microcosm, the wide earth sobbed. The starglobe sank in her; the colours faded. The death-dew rose and the wild birds in her breast climbed to her throat and gathered songless, hovering, all tumult, wing to wing, so ardent for those climes where all things end.

We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.

When he at least reached the door the handle had cease to vibrate. Lowering himself suddenly to his knees he placed his head and the vagaries of his left eye (which was for ever trying to dash up and down the vertical surface of the door), he was able by dint of concentration to observe, within three inches of his keyholed eye, an eye which was not his, being not only of a different colour to his own iron marble, but being, which is more convincing, on the other side of the door.

Years on end, and swords on end - where will it end, if our ears unbend - what shall I spend on a wrinkled friend in a pair of tights like a bunch of lights?

Yet not with all of me am I in love. Too much of my own quietness is with me.

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.

I am clever enough to know that I am clever.