“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 35 (p. 577)
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Mervyn Peake 91
English writer, artist, poet and illustrator 1911–1968Related quotes


“When words leave off, music begins.”
As quoted in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1977) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 343

“How can we not create a fantasy in our minds when the reality is so hard?”
Source: Peony in Love

“So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.”
Source: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells
The Abolition of Work (1985)
Context: The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or — better still — industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.

Reported in Justice William O. Douglas, The Court Years (1980), p. 8

Source: The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

Woźniak, Olga; Vetulani, Jerzy (24 December 2011): Stań się dobrym. To się opłaca, interview. Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish).