Mervyn Peake citations

“I am the wilderness lost in man.”

“What had his memory done to her that he should now be seeing a creature so radically at variance with the image that had filled his mind?”

“Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.”

“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.”

“To live at all is miracle enough.”

“Why break the heart that never beat from love?”

“Oh how I hate people!”

“I am clever enough to know that I am clever.”

“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.”

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

“I, while the gods laugh, the world's vortex am;
Maelström of passions in that hidden sea
Whose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me;
And in small compass the dark waters cram.”

“Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.”

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

“Something to remember, that: cats for missiles.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“Pompous as only failures can be.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”