Mervyn Peake quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Mervyn Peake

Top Mervyn Peake Quotes

Browse top 100 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Mervyn Peake.

Favorite Mervyn Peake Quotes

1. "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! For nothing short of pre-knowledge could have stopped the occurrence, so suddenly it sprang upon them." ~ Mervyn Peake

2. "Glorious,' said Steerpike, 'is a dictionary word. 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. In dead and shackled language, my dears, you *are* glorious, but oh, to give vent to a brand new sounds that might convince you of what I really think of you, as you sit there in your purple splendour, side by side! But no, it is impossible. Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia. Dead words defy me. I can make no sound, dear ladies, that is apt.' 'You could try,' said Clarice. 'We aren't busy.' She smoothed the shining fabric of her dress with her long, lifeless fingers. 'Impossible,' replied the youth, rubbing his chin. 'Quite impossible. Only believe in my admiration for your beauty that will one day be recognized by the whole castle. Meanwhile, preserve all dignity and silent power in your twin bosoms." ~ Mervyn Peake

3. "But there were also times when she cried out in the darkness biting her lips - cried out against the substance of her age: for it was now that she should be young; now above all other times, with the wisdom in her, the wisdom that was frittered away in her 'teens', set aside in her twenties, now, lying there, palpable and with forty summers gone. She clenched her hands together. What good was wisdom; what good was anything when the fawn is fled from the grove?" ~ Mervyn Peake

4. "His mind had been working away behind his high forehead. Unimaginative himself he could recognize imagination in her: he had come upon one whose whole nature was the contradiction of his own. He knew that behind her simplicity was something he could never have. Something he despised as impractical. Something which would never carry her to power or riches, but would retard her progress and keep her apart in a world of her own make-believe. To win her favour he must talk in her own language." ~ Mervyn Peake

5. "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

6. "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

7. "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

8. "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

9. "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

10. "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

11. "She and her sister were dressed in purple, with gold buckles at their throats by way of brooches, and another gold buckle each at the end of hatpins which they wore through their grey hair in order apparently to match their brooches. Their faces, identical to the point of indecency, were quite expressionless, as though they were the preliminary lay-outs for faces and were waiting for sentience to be injected." ~ Mervyn Peake

12. "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

13. "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

14. "I am the wilderness lost in man." ~ Mervyn Peake

15. "When he at least reached the door the handle had cease to vibrate. Lowering himself suddenly to his knees he placed his head and the vagaries of his left eye (which was for ever trying to dash up and down the vertical surface of the door), he was able by dint of concentration to observe, within three inches of his keyholed eye, an eye which was not his, being not only of a different colour to his own iron marble, but being, which is more convincing, on the other side of the door." ~ Mervyn Peake

16. "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

17. "Yet not with all of me am I in love. Too much of my own quietness is with me." ~ Mervyn Peake

18. "It was not certain what significance the ceremony held... but the formality was no less sacred for it being unintelligible" ~ Mervyn Peake

19. "I am clever enough to know that I am clever." ~ Mervyn Peake

20. "Civilized people don't feel." ~ Mervyn Peake

21. "In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question." ~ Mervyn Peake

22. "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

23. "Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargoCongealed in the dark arteries,Old veinsThat hold Glamorgan's blood.The midnight miner in the secret seams,Limb, life, and bread.- Rhondda Valley" ~ Mervyn Peake

24. "I am too rich already, for my eyes mint gold.- Coloured Money" ~ Mervyn Peake

25. "And then he began to laugh in a peculiar way of his own which was both violent and soundless. His heavy reclining body, draped in its black gown, heaved to and fro. His knees drew themselves up to his chin. His arms dangled over the sides of the chair and were helpless. His head rolled from side to side. It was as though he were in the last stages of strychnine poisoning. But no sound came, nor did his mouth even open. Gradually the spasm grew weaker, and when the natural sand colour of his face had returned (for his corked-up laughter had turned it dark red) he began his smoking again in earnest." ~ Mervyn Peake

26. "For what use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook's nest with every twig a duty." ~ Mervyn Peake

27. "Cold love's the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized." ~ Mervyn Peake

28. "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

29. "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

30. "It is my cape of good hope, and if it isn't I will probably bite your nose off" ~ Mervyn Peake

31. "With what characters she had filled this lost stage of emptiness! It was here that she would see the people of her imagination, the fierce figures of her making, as they strolled from corner to corner, brooded like monsters or flew through the air like seraphs with burning wings, or danced, or fought, or laughed, or cried. This was her attic of make-believe, where she would watch her mind's companions advancing or retreating across the dusty floor." ~ Mervyn Peake

32. "Are you lishening, my pretty vermin, are you lishening?" ~ Mervyn Peake

33. "Irma, my dear sister,' said Prunesquallor, 'I have two things to say. Firstly, why in the name of discomfort are we hanging around in the hall and probably dying of a draught that as far as I'm concerned runs up my right trouser leg and sets my gluteous maximus twtiching; and secondly, what is wrong, when you boil the matter down - with feet? I have always found mine singularly useful, especially for walking with. In fact, ha, ha, ha, one might almost imagine that they have been designed for that very purpose." ~ Mervyn Peake

34. "The crumbling castle, looming among the mists, exhaled the season, and every cold stone breathed it out. The tortured trees by the dark lake burned and dripped, their leaves snatched by the wind were whirled in wild circles through the towers. The clouds mouldered as they lay coiled, or shifted themselves uneasily upon the stone skyfield, sending up wreathes that drifted through the turrets and swarmed up hidden walls." ~ Mervyn Peake

35. "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

36. "Of Swelter's acreage, only a perch or two here and there might, if broken, prove vulnerable loam. That he bled profusely could prove little. There was blood in him to revitalize an anaemic army, with enough left over to cool the guns. Placed end to end, his blood vessels might have coiled up the Tower of Flints and half way down again like a Virginia creeper -- a vampire's home from home." ~ Mervyn Peake

37. "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

38. "There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble. Than its stone walls its paper walls are thicker; armoured with learning, with philosophy, with poetry that drifts or dances clamped though it is in midnight. Shielded with flax and calfskin and a cold weight of ink, there broods the ghost of Sepulchrave, the melancholy Earl, seventy-sixth lord of half-light." ~ Mervyn Peake

39. "I know she'll hate him. She likes to be the only one, you know. She likes to dream that she's queen and that when the rest are dead there'll be no one who can order her to do anything. She said, dear, that she'd burn down the whole place, burn down Goremenghast when she was ruler and she'd live on her own, and I said she was wicked, and she said that everyone was- everyone and everything except rivers, clouds, and some rabbits. She makes me frightened sometimes." ~ Mervyn Peake

40. "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

41. "Countless candles dribbled with hot wax, and their flames, like little flags, fluttered in the unchartered currents of air. Thousands of lamps, naked, or shuttered behind coloured glass, burned with their glows of purple, amber, grass-green, blue, blood red and even grey. The walls of Gormenghast were like the walls of paradise or like 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." ~ Mervyn Peake

42. "Each day we live is a glass roomUntil we break it with the thrustingOf the spirit and pass throughThe splintered walls to the green pasturesWhere the birds and buds are breakingInto fabulous song and hueBy the still waters.- Each Day We Live is a Glass Room" ~ Mervyn Peake

43. "The crags of the mountain were ruthless in the moon; cold, deadly and shining. Distance had no meaning. The tangled glittering of the forest roof rolled away, but its furthermost reaches were brought suddenly nearer in a bound by the terrifying effect of proximity in the mountain that they swarmed. The mountain was neither far away nor was it close at hand. It arose starkly, enormously, across the lens of the eye. The hollow itself was a cup of light. Every blade of the grass was of consequence, and the few scattered stones held an authority that made their solid, separate marks upon the brain - each one with its own unduplicated shape: each rising brightly from the ink of its own spilling." ~ Mervyn Peake

44. "Steerpike was, of course, alive with ideas and projects. These two half-witted women were a gift. That they should be the sisters of Lord Sepulchrave was of tremendous strategic value. They would prove an advance on the Prunesquallors, if not intellectually at any rate socially, and that at the moment was what mattered. And in any case, the lower the mentality of his employers the more scope for his own projects." ~ Mervyn Peake

45. "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

46. "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." ~ Mervyn Peake

47. "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

48. "The fact that it was happening all over again; that it was a repetition in no way helped me, for it appeared that what was once unbelievable was now an unarguable fact.("Danse Macabre")" ~ Mervyn Peake

49. "Swelter, as soon as he saw who it was, stopped dead, and across his face little billows of flesh ran swiftly here and there until, as though they had determined to adhere to the same impulse, they swept up into both oceans of soft cheek, leaving between them a vacuum, a gaping segment like a slice cut from a melon. It was horrible. It was as though nature had lost control. As though the smile, as a concept, as a manifestation of pleasure, had been a mistake, for here on the face of Swelter the idea had been abused." ~ Mervyn Peake

50. "From daybreak to sunset she turned her thoughts, like boulders, over. She set them in long lines. She rearranged their order..." ~ Mervyn Peake

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Hayir, hayir. Yalnizca dünyanin en mutsuz insanlari sonsuza dek yasamak ister, çünkü hayatlari boyunca istedikleri hiçbir seyi yapamadiklarini düsünürler. Yeterince zamanlari olmadigini, hayattan paylarina düseni alamadiklarini hissederler."
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