Mervyn Peake Quotes

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!

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

It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.

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.

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

Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracks.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

The walls of Gormenghast were like the walls of paradise or 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.

Drear ritual turned its wheel.

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

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

His days were full of meaningless ceremonies whose sacredness appeared to be in inverse ratio to their comprehensibility or usefulness.

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.

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

“Then be silent,” said Titus, and in spite of his anger, the heady wine of autocracy tasted sweet upon his tongue—sweet and dangerous—for he was only now learning that he had power over others, not only through the influence of his birthright but through a native authority that was being wielded for the first time—and all this he knew to be dangerous, for as it grew, this bullying would taste ever sweeter and fiercer and the naked cry of freedom would become faint and the Thing who had taught him freedom would become no more than a memory.

There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble." These words made me a writer. When I was in middle school, my mother brought home a used paperback copy of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast…Reading this at the age of 13, I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language. Fantasy is death by owls. It’s mourning through gesture. It’s music, incantation in half-light. An inverted heart.