Mervyn Peake: Greatness

Mervyn Peake was English writer, artist, poet and illustrator. Explore interesting quotes on greatness.
Mervyn Peake: 182   quotes 3   likes

“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

"Each Day I Live in a Glass Room," A Reverie of Bone and other Poems (1967)

Sense

“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 book Titus Alone

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 42 (p. 881)

Love , Game

“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.”

Mervyn Peake

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

Life , Beauty , Way , Home

“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.”

Mervyn Peake

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

Youth , Law , Home , Boy

“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!”

Mervyn Peake

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

Law , Fight , Childhood

“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.”

Mervyn Peake

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

Way , Time , Reading

“So you thought you’d come back, my wicked one. Where have you been?”
“In hell,” said Titus. “Swigging blood and munching scorpions.”
“That must have been great fun, my darling.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Alone

“Not so,” said Titus, “hell is overrated.”
Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 42 (p. 881)

Hell

“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

Robertson Davies

World , Age