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.

I saw all of a sudden
No sign of any ship.

There's something else, Mr. Muzzlehatch."
"I'm sure there is. In fact there is everything else.

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.

Once there were islands all a-sprout with palms: and coral reefs and sands as white as milk. What is there now but a vast shambles of the heart? Filth, squalor, and a world of little men.

I am a beggar."
"You are a travesty," said Titus, "and when you die the earth will breathe again.

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

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.

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

What had his memory done to her that he should now be seeing a creature so radically at variance with the image that had filled his mind?

This extreme air of abstraction, of empty and bland removedness, was almost terrifying. It was that kind of unconcern that humbled the ardent, the passionate of nature, and made them wonder why they were expending so much energy of body and spirit when every day but led them to the worms. Deadyawn, by temperament or lack of it, achieved unwittingly what wise men crave: equipoise.

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.

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.

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.

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