Mervyn Peake Quotes

“But we have seen it in the air,
A fairy like a William Pear”

Source: Titus Groan

“This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.”

Poem O Here it is

“The paper is breathless
Under the hand
And the pencil is poised
Like a warlock's wand.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 1 “The Hall of the Bright Carvings” (p. 9)

“Never having had either positive cruelty or kindness shown to her by her parents, but only an indifference, she was not conscious of what it was that she missed—affection.”

Poem in The Glassblowers (1950)

“The lives of the Outer Dwellers had become almost normal again. Bitterness was their bread and rivalry their wine.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 37 “The Grotto” (p. 211)

“Pompous as only failures can be.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 69 (p. 743)

“There is something about a swarm that is damaging to the pride of its individual members.”

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 82 (p. 959)

“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.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 32 (p. 555)

“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.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 2 (pp. 404-405)

“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!”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 36 (p. 595)

“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.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 17 (p. 484)

“Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracks.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.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 22 (p. 527)

“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.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 1, section 1 (p. 399)

“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.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 38 (p. 606)

“Autumn returned to Gormenghast like a dark spirit re-entering its stronghold.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 69 “Mr Rottcodd Again” (p. 396)

“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.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 28 “Flay Brings a Message” (p. 152)

““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.””

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 69 “Mr Rottcodd Again” (p. 393)

“O'er seas that have no beaches
To end their waves upon,
I floated with twelve peaches,
A sofa and a swan.”

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 29 (p. 852)

““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.”

Poem O'er seas that have no beaches

“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.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 65 “By Gormenghast Lake” (p. 367)

“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.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 40 “Meanwhile” (pp. 230-231)

“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.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 1 “The Hall of the Bright Carvings” (p. 9; opening words)

“Drear ritual turned its wheel.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 31 “Reintroducing the Twins” (p. 173)

“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.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 60 “In Preparation for Violence” (p. 323)

“At the back of their personal troubles, hopes and fears, this less immediate trepidation grew, this intangible suggestion of change, that most unforgivable of all heresies.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 32 “The Fir-Cones” (p. 174)

“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.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 59 “Presage” (p. 320)

Mervyn Peake book Boy in Darkness

"Boy in Darkness," Sometime, Never (1956)

“There is danger in deep water, and danger is more real than beauty in a boy’s mind.”

“He had learned that there were other ways of life from the ways of his great home. He had completed an experience. He had emptied the bright goblet of romance; at a single gulp he had emptied it. The glass of it lay scattered on the floor. But with the beauty and the ugliness, the ice and the fire of it on his tongue and in his blood he could begin again.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 50, section 2 (p. 661)

“When Uncle Jake
Became a snake
He never found it out;
And so as no one mentions it
One sees him still about.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 68, section 3 (p. 737)

“It was when he saw the great walls looming above him that he began to run.
He ran as though to obey an order. And this was so, though he knew nothing of it. He ran in the acknowledgement of a law as old as the laws of his home, the law of flesh and blood. The law of longing. The law of change. The law of youth. The law that separates the generations, that draws the child from his mother, the boy from his father, the youth from both.
And it was the law of quest. The law that few obey for lack of valour. The craving of the young for the unknown and all that lies beyond the tenuous skyline.”

Poem Uncles and aunts

“Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other – other than this umbrageous legacy. For first and ever foremost he is child.
A ritual, more compelling than ever devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forebears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe’s childhood.
The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter ‘Weep’. Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak ‘Rejoice!’ O little revolution in great shades!”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 80 (p. 805)

““Let go of my arm, or I will scream for God.”
“He never helped you. Have you forgotten?””

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 1, section 1 (p. 399; opening words)

“So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage.”

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 56 (p. 910)

“A spider lowered itself, fathom by fathom, on a perilous length of thread and was suddenly transfixed in the path of a sunbeam and, for an instant, was a thing of radiant gold.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 2 (p. 403)

“At an ink-stained desk, with his chin cupped in his hands, Titus was contemplating, as in a dream, the chalk-marks on the blackboard. They represented a sum in short division, but might as well have been some hieroglyphic message from a moonstruck prophet to his lost tribe a thousand years ago.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 4, section 1 (p. 408)

“He was as young as twenty years allowed, and as old as it could make him.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 4, section 2 (p. 410)

“His face wore the resigned expression of one who knew that the only difference between one day and the next lies in the pages of a calendar.”

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 5 (p. 815)

“Leave the stronger
and the lesser
things to me!
Lest that conger
named Vanessa
who is longer
than a dresser
visits thee.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 11 (p. 441)

“Once there were islands all a-sprout with palms: and coral reefs and sands as white as milk. What is there now but a vast shambles of the heart? Filth, squalor, and a world of little men.”

Poem Vanessa

“The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity.”

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 114 (p. 1012)

“It was not possible for him to visit his library as often as he wished, for the calls made upon him by the endless ceremonials which were his exacting duty to perform robbed him for many hours each day of his only pleasure—books.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 51, section 5 (p. 667)

““Then be silent,” said Titus, and in spite of his anger, the heady wine of autocracy tasted sweet upon his tongue—sweet and dangerous—for he was only now learning that he had power over others, not only through the influence of his birthright but through a native authority that was being wielded for the first time—and all this he knew to be dangerous, for as it grew, this bullying would taste ever sweeter and fiercer and the naked cry of freedom would become faint and the Thing who had taught him freedom would become no more than a memory.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 29 “The Library” (p. 158)

“His days were full of meaningless ceremonies whose sacredness appeared to be in inverse ratio to their comprehensibility or usefulness.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 77 (p. 774)

“The summer was heavy with a kind of soft grey-blue weight in the sky—yet not in the sky, for it was as though there were no sky, but only air, an impalpable grey-blue substance, drugged with the weight of its own heat and hue.”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 80 (p. 802)

“The ritual which his body had had to perform for fifty years had been no preparation for the unexpected.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 60 “In Preparation for Violence” (p. 323)

“There is no point in erecting a structure,” said Muzzlehatch, taking no notice of Titus’s question, “unless someone else pulls it down. There is no value in a rule until it is broken. There is nothing in life unless there is death at the back of it. Death, dear boy, leaning over the edge of the world and grinning like a boneyard.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 41 “The Burning” (pp. 248-249)