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Mervyn Peake Quotes
Best Quotes by Mervyn Peake (Top 10)
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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 -
Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.
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. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
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 -
To live at all is miracle enough.
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 -
Oh how I hate people!
Mervyn Peake -
I am the wilderness lost in man.
Mervyn Peake -
Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.
Mervyn Peake -
For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless.
Mervyn Peake
More Mervyn Peake Quotes
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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.
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He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.
Mervyn Peake -
Something to remember, that: cats for missiles.
Mervyn Peake -
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 -
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 -
Yet not with all of me am I in love. Too much of my own quietness is with me.
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 -
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 -
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 -
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