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Mervyn Peake cytaty
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Mervyn Laurence Peake – brytyjski artysta, poeta i ilustrator. Najbardziej znany ze swojego dzieła Gormenghast, gdzie opisuje życie Tytusa Groana, 77. hrabiego na zamku Gormenghast. Jego dzieło porównuje się czasami do prac J.R.R. Tolkiena, choć surrealistyczne zacięcie w jego twórczości bliższe są tendencjom jakie znajdziemy w książkach Charlesa Dickensa czy Roberta Louisa Stevensona. Twórczość Peake'a obejmuje także krótkie opowiadania, np. Letters from a Lost Uncle.

Pisarz zasłynął w latach 40. jako znany portrecista i jego prace do dziś dnia wiszą w Narodowej Galerii Portretów w Anglii. Wikipedia  

✵ 9. Lipiec 1911 – 17. Listopad 1968   •   Natępne imiona Мервін Пік, מרווין פיק
Mervyn Peake: 91   Cytatów 0   Polubień

Mervyn Peake: Cytaty po angielsku

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

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

““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.””

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Alone

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

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

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Mervyn Peake

Poem O'er seas that have no beaches

““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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Alone

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

“Drear ritual turned its wheel.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka 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.”

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Mervyn Peake

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

““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.””

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Alone

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake

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

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

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Mervyn Peake

Poem Uncles and aunts

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake

Źródło: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 35 (p. 577)

“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!”

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Mervyn Peake

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

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

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Alone

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake

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

“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!”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Alone

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

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

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Mervyn Peake

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Groan

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake

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

“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.”

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Mervyn Peake

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

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

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Mervyn Peake książka Titus Alone

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