Best 72 quotes of Mervyn Peake on MyQuotes

Mervyn Peake

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

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

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

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

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

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

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    I am the wilderness lost in man.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    I am too rich already, for my eyes Mint gold, while my heart cries.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

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

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    Oh how I hate people!

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    [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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    Something to remember, that: cats for missiles.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

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

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

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

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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

  • By Anonym
    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 humor. It is naked noise and naked malice.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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!

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    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?

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

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

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    And a ton came down on a coloured road, And a ton came down on a gaol, And a ton came down on a freckled girl, And a ton on the black canal, And a ton came down on a hospital, And a ton on a manuscript, And a ton shot up through the dome of a church, And a ton roared down to the crypt. And a ton danced over the Thames and filled A thousand panes with stars, And the splinters leapt on the Surrey shore To the tune of a thousand scars.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    And then he began to laugh in a peculiar way of his own which was both violent and soundless. His heavy reclining body, draped in its black gown, heaved to and fro. His knees drew themselves up to his chin. His arms dangled over the sides of the chair and were helpless. His head rolled from side to side. It was as though he were in the last stages of strychnine poisoning. But no sound came, nor did his mouth even open. Gradually the spasm grew weaker, and when the natural sand colour of his face had returned (for his corked-up laughter had turned it dark red) he began his smoking again in earnest.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    ...another comber of far pleasure followed the first, for his books came suddenly before his eyes, row upon row of volumes, row upon priceless row of calf-bound Thought, of philosophy and fiction, of travel and fantasy; the stern and the ornate, the moods of gold or green, of sepia, rose, or black; the picaresque, the arabesque, the scientific - the essays, the poetry and the drama. All this, he felt, he would now re-enter. He could inhabit the world of words, with, at the back of his melancholy, a solace he had not known before.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    Before man's bravery I bow my head: More so when valour is unnatural And fear, a bat between the shoulder-blades Flaps its cold webs - but I am ill at ease With propaganda glory, and the lies Of statesmen and the lords of slippery trades. - Before Man's Bravery I Bow My Head May 1941.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    Bellgrove, eminently lovable, because of his individual weakness, his incompetence, his failure as a man, a scholar, a leader or even as a companion, was neverless utterly alone. For the weak, above all, have their friends. Yet his gentleness, his pretence at authority, his palpable humanity were unable, for some reason or other, to function. He was demonstrably the type of venerable and absent-minded professor about whom all the sharp-beaked boys of the world should swarm.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man's-land, over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood's red bugles. To be alone and evil! To be a god at bay. What was more absolute?

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    Civilized people don't feel.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    Each day we live is a glass room Until we break it with the thrusting Of the spirit and pass through The splintered walls to the green pastures Where the birds and buds are breaking Into fabulous song and hue By the still waters. - Each Day We Live is a Glass Room

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    For what is more lovable than failure?

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    From daybreak to sunset she turned her thoughts, like boulders, over. She set them in long lines. She rearranged their order...

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... And darkness winds between the characters. - Gormenghast

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargo Congealed in the dark arteries, Old veins That hold Glamorgan's blood. The midnight miner in the secret seams, Limb, life, and bread. - Rhondda Valley

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    His staff had shaken hands with her as though a woman was merely another kind of man. Fools! The seeds of Eve were in this radiant creature. The lullabyes of half a million years throbbed in her throat. Had they no sense of wonder, no reverence, no pride?

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

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    How's the blood-stream, my dear, invaluable little woman? How's the blood-stream?"... "It's quite comfortable, sir...I think, sir, thank you."... "Aha!"..."a comfortable stream, is it? Aha! v-e-r-y good. V-e-r-y good. Dawdling 'twixt hill and hill, no doubt. Meandering through groves of bone, threading the tissues and giving what sustenance it can to your dear old body...I am so glad. But in yourself - right deep down in yourself - how do you feel? Carnally speaking, are you at peace - from the dear grey hairs of your head to the patter of your little feet - are you at peace?" "What does he mean, dear?" said poor Mrs. Slagg, clutching Fuschia's arm.... "He wants to know if you feel well or not.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

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

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    I enjoy the fantastic and the sheer excitement of having a sheet of white paper and a pen in one’s hand and no dictator on earth can say what word I put down – I put down what I want to put down.

  • By Anonym
    Mervyn Peake

    If seeing her an hour before her last Weak cough into all blackness I could yet Be held by chalk-white walls - The Consumptive. Belsen 1945