Mervyn Peake: Trending quotes

“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.”

““Life must be various, incongruous, vile and electric. Life must be ruthless and as full of love as may be found in a jaguar’s fang.”
“I like the way you talk, young man,” said Grass, “but I don’t know what you’re saying.””

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

“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: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 24 (p. 841)

“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

“There are times when the emotions are so clamorous and the rational working of the mind so perfunctory that there is no telling where the actual leaves off and the images of fantasy begin.”

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

“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 35 (p. 577)

““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)

“It was thought that he had genius, if only because he had been able to delegate his duties in so intricate a way that there was never any need for him to do anything at all. His signature, which was necessary from time to time at the end of long notices which no one read, was always faked, and even the ingenious system of delegation whereon his greatness rested was itself worked out by another.”

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

“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!”

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 11 (p. 440)

“An aching to be once again in the land from which he grew gave him no rest. There is no calm for those who are uprooted. They are wanderers, homesick and defiant. Love itself is helpless to heal them though the dust rises with every footfall—drifts down the corridors—settles on branch or cornice—each breath an inhalation from the past so that the lungs, like a miner’s, are dark with bygone times.
Whatever they eat, whatever they drink, is never the bread of home or the corn of their own valleys. It is never the wine of their own vineyards. It is a foreign brew.”

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 40 “Meanwhile” (p. 234)

“This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.”

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 34 (p. 862)

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

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 11 “The Attic” (p. 58)

“There he was. The infant Titus. His eyes were open but he was quite still. The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet. Earth’s passions, earth’s griefs, earth’s incongruous, ridiculous humours—dormant, yet visible in the wry pippin of a face.”

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

“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: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 13 “Keda” (p. 73)

“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)