Top 88 Mervyn Peake Quotes
#1. Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The 'Lord of the Rings' template or the 'Gormenghast' mold.
Paul Di Filippo
#2. I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.
Christopher Fowler
#3. The artist and writer Mervyn Peake, invalided out of military service, joined the Design, Poster and Visualising Group of the Ministry of Information in 1942.
Laura Brandon
#4. 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
#5. The sun sank with a sob and darkness waded in from all horizons so that the sky contracted and there was no more light left in the world, when, at this very moment of annihilation, the moon, as though she had been waiting for her cue, sailed up the night.
Mervyn Peake
#6. 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!
Mervyn Peake
#7. For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless.
Mervyn Peake
#9. Cold love's the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized.
Mervyn Peake
#10. [Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.
Mervyn Peake
#11. 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.
Mervyn Peake
#12. Before it had awoke to die on the instant of its waking, a score of bells and clocks had shouted midday and for a minute after its death, from near and far the clappers in their tents of rusted iron clanged across Gormenghast.
Mervyn Peake
#13. Then slowly, as his erratic shape approached the next guttering aura he would begin by degrees to become a silhouette, until immediately before the candle he would for a moment appear like an inky scarecrow, a mantis of pitch-black cardboard worked with strings.
Mervyn Peake
#14. Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.
Mervyn Peake
#15. Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargo
Congealed in the dark arteries,
Old veins
That hold Glamorgan's blood.
The midnight miner in the secret seams,
Limb, life, and bread.
- Rhondda Valley
Mervyn Peake
#16. It was Crabcalf who, surrounded and walled in by the hundreds of unsold copies of his ill-fated novel, felt that he if anyone should be the judge not only of literature, but all that went on behind the sordid scenes.
Mervyn Peake
#17. I saw a Puffin
In the Bay of Baffin
Sittin on Nuffin
And it was Laffin.
Mervyn Peake
#19. I was brooding, boy. Than which there is no richer pastime. It muffles one with rotting plumes. It gives forth sullen music. It is the smell of home.
Mervyn Peake
#20. Years on end, and swords on end - where will it end, if our ears unbend - what shall I spend on a wrinkled friend in a pair of tights like a bunch of lights?
Mervyn Peake
#21. 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.
Mervyn Peake
#22. I am too rich already, for my eyes mint gold.
- Coloured Money
Mervyn Peake
#23. Meanwhile Bellgrove had been savouring love's rare aperitif, the ageless language of the eyes.
Mervyn Peake
#24. It is my cape of good hope, and if it isn't I will probably bite your nose off
Mervyn Peake
#25. So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage. So limp of body that their purple dresses appear no more indicative of housing nerves and sinews than when they hang suspended from their hooks.
Mervyn Peake
#26. And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?
Mervyn Peake
#27. As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.
Mervyn Peake
#29. But haven't all ambitious people something of the monstrous about them? You, sir, for instance, if you will forgive me, are a little bit monstrous.
Mervyn Peake
#30. For answer Mr Flay shot his head forward out of his collar and croaked, 'Silence! you kitchen thing. Hold your tongue you greasy fork.
Mervyn Peake
#31. And there shall be a flame-green daybreak soon. And love itself will cry for insurrection! For tomorrow is also a day - and Titus has entered his stronghold.
Mervyn Peake
#32. 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.
Mervyn Peake
#33. But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man's-land, over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood's red bugles. To be alone and evil! To be a god at bay. What was more absolute?
Mervyn Peake
#34. Yet not with all of me am I in love. Too much of my own quietness is with me.
Mervyn Peake
#35. Are you lishening, my pretty vermin, are you lishening?
Mervyn Peake
#36. My passion,
My queen of fire and dread;
Divine amalgamation
Of swedes and cooper-thread,
Unstitch your irritation
And kiss me when I'm dead.
Mervyn Peake
#37. Equality,' said Steerpike,' is the thing. It is the only true and central premise from which constructive ideas can radiate freely and be operated without prejudice. Absolute equality of status. Equality of wealth. Equality of power.
Mervyn Peake
#38. I am clever enough to know that I am clever.
Mervyn Peake
#39. Prunesquallor, as urbane as ever, had nevertheless something in his fish-like eyes that might almost be described as determination. One glance at his sister was sufficient to make him realize that to attempt to reason with her would be about as fruitful as to try to christianize a vulture.
Mervyn Peake
#40. There is a brotherhood among the kindly- Closer and defter and more integral- Than any of aisle or coven- For love rang out before the chapel bell
Mervyn Peake
#41. Yet here apparently on this stifling summer afternoon was the eye of Mr. Flay at the outer keyhole of the Hall of the Bright Carvings, and presumably the rest of Mr Flay was joined on behind it.
Mervyn Peake
#42. He does not listen for an answer, but yawns, his face opening lewdly upon regions compared with which nudity becomes a milliner's invention.
Mervyn Peake
#43. The Earth swirls down through the ominous moons of preconsidered generations.
Mervyn Peake
#44. Words can be tiresome as a swarm of insects. They can prick and buzz! Words can be no more than a series of farts; or on the other hand they can be adamantine, obdurate, inviolable, stone upon stone.
Mervyn Peake
#45. She had shown him by her independence how it was only fear that held people together. The fear of being alone and the fear of being different.
Mervyn Peake
#46. His youth had been so long ago that he could remember nothing of it but he presumed, erroneously, that he had tasted the purple fruit, had broken hearts and hymens, had tosses flowers to ladies on balconies, had drunk champagne out of their shoes and generally been irresistible.
Mervyn Peake
#47. Through her, in microcosm, the wide earth sobbed. The starglobe sank in her; the colours faded. The death-dew rose and the wild birds in her breast climbed to her throat and gathered songless, hovering, all tumult, wing to wing, so ardent for those climes where all things end.
Mervyn Peake
#48. In great thick dusty books he read
And hardly ever went to bed
Before it was eleven.
- One Day When They Had Settled Down
Mervyn Peake
#49. If seeing her an hour before her last
Weak cough into all blackness I could yet
Be held by chalk-white walls
- The Consumptive. Belsen 1945
Mervyn Peake
#50. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
Mervyn Peake
#51. But Fuchsia might as well have been carved from dark marble. Only her tears moved.
Mervyn Peake
#52. For what use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook's nest with every twig a duty.
Mervyn Peake
#53. From daybreak to sunset she turned her thoughts, like boulders, over. She set them in long lines. She rearranged their order ...
Mervyn Peake
#54. Each day we live is a glass room
Until we break it with the thrusting
Of the spirit and pass through
The splintered walls to the green pastures
Where the birds and buds are breaking
Into fabulous song and hue
By the still waters.
- Each Day We Live is a Glass Room
Mervyn Peake
#55. He had no longer any need for home, for he carried his Gormenghast within him. All that he sought was jostling within himself. He had grown up. What a boy had set out to seek a man had found, found by the act of living.
Mervyn Peake
#56. He ran because his decision had been made. It had been made for him by the convergence of half-forgotten motives, of desires and reasons, of varied yet congruous impulses. And the convergence of all these to a focus point of action.
Mervyn Peake
#57. Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one's face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.
Mervyn Peake
#58. It was obvious that their sorrows were conjoined.
Mervyn Peake
#59. 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.
Mervyn Peake
#60. 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
#61. I am your boat! I am your crew
Your rudder and your mast -
Your friend, I am your limpet too
And your elastoplast.
- Tintinnabulum
Mervyn Peake
#62. Let them touch him. For every hair that's hurt I'll stop a heart.
Mervyn Peake
#63. His staff had shaken hands with her as though a woman was merely another kind of man. Fools! The seeds of Eve were in this radiant creature. The lullabyes of half a million years throbbed in her throat. Had they no sense of wonder, no reverence, no pride?
Mervyn Peake
#64. She stepped outwards into the dim atmosphere, and falling, was most fabulously lit by the moon and the sun.
Mervyn Peake
#65. Why break the heart that never beat from love?
Mervyn Peake
#66. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.
Mervyn Peake
#67. It was not certain what significance the ceremony held ... but the formality was no less sacred for it being unintelligible
Mervyn Peake
#68. I want a big breakfast," said Fuchsia at last. "I want a lot to eat, I'm going to think today.
Mervyn Peake
#69. Keda's oldness was the work of fate, alchemy. An occult agedness. A transparent darkness. A broken and mysterious grove. A tragedy, a glory, a decay. - Titus Groan
Mervyn Peake
#70. 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 it s Outer Walls.
Mervyn Peake
#73. She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.
Mervyn Peake
#74. Drear ritual turned its wheel. The ferment of the heart, within these walls, was mocked by every length of sleeping shadow. The passions, no greater than candle flames, flickered in Time's yawn, for Gormenghast, huge and adumbrate, out-crumbles all.
Mervyn Peake
#75. Indeed he had worn that piece of furniture - or symbol of bone-laziness - into such a shape as made the descent of any other body than his own into that crater of undulating horsehair a hazardous enterprise.
Mervyn Peake
#77. There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.
Mervyn Peake
#79. His voice is unmuffled - it is like a bell, clearly ringing in the night of our confusion; but the clarity is the clarity of imponderable depth ...
Mervyn Peake
#81. The moon slid inexorably into its zenith, the shadows shrivelling to the feet of all that cast them, and as Rantel approached the hollow at the hem of the Twisted Woods he was treading in a pool of his own midnight.
Mervyn Peake
#82. Something to remember, that: cats for missiles.
Mervyn Peake
#83. Keda,' she said to herself,' Keda, this is tragedy.' But as her words hung emptily in the morning air, she clenched her hands for she could feel no anguish and the bright bird that had filled her breast was still singing ... was still singing.
Mervyn Peake
#84. Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.
Mervyn Peake
#85. The castle was round and about them, widespread and as unchartable as a dark day.
Mervyn Peake
#86. His mother stood before him like a monument. He saw her great outline through the blur of his weakness and his passion. She made no movement at all.
Mervyn Peake
#87. His was not the hatred that arises suddenly like a storm and as suddenly abates. It was, once the initial shock of anger and pain was over, a calculated thing that grew in a bloodless way.
Mervyn Peake
#88. Home is a room dappled with firelight: there are pictures and books. And when the rain sighs, and the acorns fall, there are patterns of leaves against the drawn curtains. Home is where I was safe. Home is what I fled from.
Mervyn Peake
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
