Mervyn Peake Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Mervyn Peake
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
Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.

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

Mervyn Peake
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.

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

Mervyn Peake
Leave the stronger
and the lesser
things to me!
Lest that conger
named Vanessa
who is longer
than a dresser
visits thee.

Mervyn Peake
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
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
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
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
He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.

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

Mervyn Peake
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
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.

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

Mervyn Peake
But we have seen it in the air,
A fairy like a William Pear

Mervyn Peake
Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracks. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue off spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river.

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

Mervyn Peake
It's not their fault if, in the heat
Of their transactions, I repeat
It's not their fault if vampires meet
And gurgle in their spats.

Mervyn Peake