Top 70 Mervyn Peake Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Oh how I hate people!”

— Mervyn Peake

2. “I am the wilderness lost in man.”

— Mervyn Peake

3. “Mount and begone. The world awaits you.”

— Mervyn Peake

4. “I am too rich already, for my eyes mint gold. – Coloured Money.”

— Mervyn Peake

5. “For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless.”

— Mervyn Peake

6. “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

7. “The Earth swirls down through the ominous moons of preconsidered generations.”

— Mervyn Peake

8. “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

9. “I am clever enough to know that I am clever.”

— Mervyn Peake

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “To live at all is miracle enough.”

— Mervyn Peake

16. “Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.”

— Mervyn Peake

17. “It is my cape of good hope, and if it isn’t I will probably bite your nose off.”

— Mervyn Peake

18. “Cold love’s the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized.”

— Mervyn Peake

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.”

— Mervyn Peake

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “I said she was wicked, and she said that everyone was – everyone and everything except rivers, clouds, and some rabbits.”

— Mervyn Peake

27. “Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.”

— Mervyn Peake

28. “He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.”

— Mervyn Peake

29. “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

30. “No eye may see dispassionately. There is no comprehension at a glance. Only the recognition of damsel, horse or fly and the assumption of damsel, horse or fly; and so with dreams and beyond, for what haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness.”

— Mervyn Peake

31. “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

32. “Don’t you think so? Don’t you think so?’ ‘I am far beyond thinking, bone of my bone. Far, far beyond thinking, I hand over the reins to you, Irma. Mount and be gone. The world awaits you.”

— Mervyn Peake

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing – flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it.”

— Mervyn Peake

38. “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

39. “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

40. “Why break the heart that never beat from love?”

— Mervyn Peake

41. “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

42. “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

43. “It was then that the Boy went through his darkest hell of all: the long ache of his body, acute as it was, was yet forgotten or disposed of in some way, for he was filled with a disembodied pain, an illness so penetrating, so horrible, that had he been given the opportunity to die he would have taken it. No normal sensation could find a way through this overpowering nausea of the soul that filled him.”

— Mervyn Peake

44. “For what use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook’s nest with every twig a duty.”

— Mervyn Peake

45. “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 its 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

46. “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

47. “He is climbing the spiral staircase of the soul of Gormenghast, bound for some pinnacle of the itching fancy – some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to himself; where he can watch the world spread out below him, and shake exultantly his clotted wings.”

— Mervyn Peake

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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