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54bd588
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she stepped outwards into the dim atmosphere, and falling, was most fabulously lit by the moon and the sun.
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Mervyn Peake |
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3777538
|
She was gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich -- her eyes smouldered. A yellow scarf hung loosely around her neck. Her shapeless dress was a flaming red. For all the straightness of her back she walked with a slouch. "Come here," said Lord Groan as she was about to pass him and the doctor. "Yes father," she said huskily. "W..
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Mervyn Peake |
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50006d7
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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.
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Mervyn Peake |
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4fe5d09
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In great thick dusty books he read And hardly ever went to bed Before it was eleven. -
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reading
reading-habits
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Mervyn Peake |
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06698fe
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Before it had awoke to die on the instant of its waking, a score of bells and clocks had shouted midday and for a minute after its death, from near and far the clappers in their tents of rusted iron clanged across Gormenghast.
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Mervyn Peake |
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d205f33
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Would you be so kind as to remove your redundant carcass from the door of this room, my man,' he said, in his high, abstracted voice; 'and keep it in the kitchen, where it is paid to do this and that among the saucepans, I believe ... would you? No one rang for you. Your mistress' voice, though high, is nothing like the ringing of a bell ... nothing at all.
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Mervyn Peake |
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0f5ff44
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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.
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Mervyn Peake |
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525c36c
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He watched her almost with indifference -for it was all in the past-and even the present was nothing to the pride of his memory.
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Mervyn Peake |
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747a887
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He ran because his decision had been made. It had been made for him by the convergence of half-forgotten motives, of desires and reasons, of varied yet congruous impulses. And the convergence of all these to a focus point of action.
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Mervyn Peake |
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f6d0b12
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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...
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Mervyn Peake |
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f009e93
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Steerpike of the Many Problems," said the Doctor. "What did you say they were? My memory is so very untrustworthy. It's as fickle as a fox. Ask me to name the third lateral bloodvessel from the extremity of my index finger that runs east to west when I lie on my face at sundown, or the percentage of chalk to be found in the knuckles of an average spinster in her fifty-seventh year, ha, ha, ha! - or even ask me, my dear boy, to give details ..
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memory
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Mervyn Peake |
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0e31397
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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?
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women
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Mervyn Peake |
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2c4e141
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The crumbs blow free down the pointless sea To the beat of a cakey heart And the sensitive steel of the knife can feel That love is a race apart In the speed of the lingering light are blown The crumbs to the hake above, And the tropical air vibrates to the drone Of a cake in the throes of love.
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nonsense
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Mervyn Peake |
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7478526
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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.
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laughter
malevolence
the-mob
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Mervyn Peake |
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3757483
|
It led on and on; vistas of forgotten metal; moribund, stiff in a thousand attitudes of mortality; with not a rat, not a mouse; not a bat, not a spider. Only the Lamb, sitting in his high chair with a faint smile upon his lips; alone in the luxury of his vaulted chamber, where the red carpet was like blood, and the walls were lined with books that rose up...up... volume after volume until the shadows engulfed them.
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Mervyn Peake |
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66107ec
|
Meanwhile the castle rolled. Great walls collapsed, one into another. The colours of the tracts were horrible. The vilest green. The most hideous purple. Here the foul shimmering of rotting fungi - there a tract of books alive with mice.
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Mervyn Peake |
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bffb11f
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Before man's bravery I bow my head: More so when valour is unnatural And fear, a bat between the shoulder-blades Flaps its cold webs - but I am ill at ease With propaganda glory, and the lies Of statesmen and the lords of slippery trades. - May 1941.
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war
propaganda
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Mervyn Peake |
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a7909dd
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The castle was as silent as some pole-axed monster. Inert, breathless, spread-eagled. It was a night that seemed to prove by the consolidation of its darkness and its silence the hopelessness of any further dawn. There was no such thing as dawn. It was an invention of the night's or of the old-wives of the night - a fable, immemorially old - recounted century after century in the eternal darkness; retold and retold to the gnomic children in..
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Mervyn Peake |
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70e890d
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what haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness.
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Mervyn Peake |
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ea198f5
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Forse non siete a conoscenza, ma vostra madre aveva il sangue cattivo. Molto cattivo. Oppure sognate degli ermellini.
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Mervyn Peake |
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c2c3edc
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The accent was of so weird a lilt that at first Steerpike could not recognize more than one sentence in three, but he had quickly attuned himself to the original cadence and as the words fell into place Steerpike realized that he was staring at a poet.
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Mervyn Peake |
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6fbf7a6
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Mind the corner of that chair, my very dear Mrs Slagg, and oh! my dear woman, you must look where you're going, by all that's circumspect, you really must.
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Mervyn Peake |
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d89d280
|
Here and there a thin beam of light threaded the warm brooding dusk and was filled with slowly moving motes like an attenuate firmament of stars revolving in grave order.
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Mervyn Peake |
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2c7655a
|
Thereon were seated in a hundred decorative attitudes, or stood immobile like carvings, or walked superbly across their sapphire setting, interweaving with each other like a living arabesque, a swarm of snowwhite cats.
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Mervyn Peake |
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192476d
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During the first half of this early period only two major ceremonies befell the child and of these Titus was happily unaware, namely the christening, which took place twelve days after his birth, and a ceremonial breakfast on his first birthday.
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Mervyn Peake |
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0d86537
|
Titus watched Keda's face with his violet eyes, his grotesque little features modified by the dull light at the corner of the passage. There was the history of man in his face. A fragment from the enormous rock of mankind. A leaf from the forest of man's passion and man's knowledge and man's pain. That was the ancientness of Titus.
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Mervyn Peake |
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6a222a2
|
These three sere beings at the shadowy corner waited on. Nannie was sixtynine, Keda was twenty-two, Titus was twelve days old.
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Mervyn Peake |
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9dd5625
|
As he trilled, as he prattled, as he indulged in his spontaneous 'conceits', as he gestured, fop-like and grotesque, his magnified eyes skidding to and fro behind the lenses of his glasses, like soap at the bottom of a bath, his brain was often other-where, and these days it was well occupied.
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Mervyn Peake |
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8ffe50e
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It took place to the accompaniment of such hideous swearing as caused his withered leg to blush beneath the sacking. It must have been hardened by many years of oaths, but this morning an awakened sense of shame at what the upper part of the body could descend to, raddled it from hip to toe. Its only consolation was that the contaminating influence had not descended lower than the lungs, and what diseases the withered leg experienced were e..
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Mervyn Peake |
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edca532
|
It was only when these nefarious doings were satisfactorily completed that Steerpike visited the aunts for the second time and re-primed them in their very simple roles as arsonists.
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Mervyn Peake |
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2d45a02
|
Aren't there any, dear?' 'No,' said Fuchsia. 'Why aren't there?' Fuchsia realized that Mrs Slagg knew virtually nothing, but the long custom of asking her questions was a hard one to break down. This realization that grown-ups did not necessarily know any more than children was something against which she had fought.
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Mervyn Peake |
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1a0685d
|
Never having had either positive cruelty or kindness shown to her by her parents, but only an indifference, she was not conscious of what it was that she missed - affection.
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Mervyn Peake |
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6ff4d9a
|
This is the darkness: I have known great storms Scourge the long day - but this is motionless And sterile: this is something featureless The blind brain turning upon drugs and worms.
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Mervyn Peake |
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f01021b
|
Not only were the books lost and the thoughts in the books, but what was to him, perhaps, the most searching loss of all, the hours of rumination which lifted him above himself and bore him upon their muffled and enormous wings. Not a day passed but he was reminded of some single volume, or of a series of works, whose very positions on the walls was so clearly indented in his mind.
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Mervyn Peake |
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57cef2d
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But we have seen it in the air,A fairy like a William Pear
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Mervyn Peake |
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9e97d5b
|
I saw all of a suddenNo sign of any ship.
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Mervyn Peake |
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e750858
|
Autumn returned to Gormenghast like a dark spirit re-entering its stronghold.
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Mervyn Peake |
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69b1a8b
|
Drear ritual turned its wheel.
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Mervyn Peake |
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a5012de
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So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage.
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Mervyn Peake |
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f84c662
|
There is something about a swarm that is damaging to the pride of its individual members.
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Mervyn Peake |
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43f8e84
|
Other people's faults can be fascinating. One's own are dreary.
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Mervyn Peake |
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5eb1245
|
There is danger in deep water, and danger is more real than beauty in a boy's mind.
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Mervyn Peake |
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1e3de16
|
He was as young as twenty years allowed, and as old as it could make him.
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Mervyn Peake |
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60c03b9
|
Art should be artless, not heartless.
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Mervyn Peake |