Gormenghast Quotes

“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, Gormenghast

“She had shown him by her independence how it was only fear that held people together. The fear of being alone and the fear of being different.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble. Than its stone walls its paper walls are thicker; armoured with learning, with philosophy, with poetry that drifts or dances clamped though it is in midnight. Shielded with flax and calfskin and a cold weight of ink, there broods the ghost of Sepulchrave, the melancholy Earl, seventy-sixth lord of half-light.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“And then he began to laugh in a peculiar way of his own which was both violent and soundless. His heavy reclining body, draped in its black gown, heaved to and fro. His knees drew themselves up to his chin. His arms dangled over the sides of the chair and were helpless. His head rolled from side to side. It was as though he were in the last stages of strychnine poisoning. But no sound came, nor did his mouth even open. Gradually the spasm grew weaker, and when the natural sand colour of his face had returned (for his corked-up laughter had turned it dark red) he began his smoking again in earnest.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“He knew that he was caught up in one of those stretches of time when for anything to happen normally would be abnormal. The dawn was too tense and highly charged for any common happening to survive.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“To say that the frozen silence contracted itself into a yet higher globe of ice were to under-rate the exquisite tension and to shroud it in words. The atmosphere had become a physical sensation. As when, before a masterpiece, the acid throat contracts, and words are millstones, so when the supernaturally outlandish happens and a masterpiece is launched through the medium of human gesture, then all human volition is withered at the source and the heart of action stops beating.
Such a moment was this. Irma, a stalagmite of crimson stone, knew, for all the riot of her veins that a page had turned over. At chapter forty? O no! At chapter one, for she had never lived before save in a pulseless preface.
How long did they remain thus? How many times had the earth moved round the sun? How many times had the great blue whales of the northern waters risen to spurt their fountains at the sky? How many reed-bucks had fallen to the claws of how many leopards, while that sublime unit of two-figure statuary remained motionless? It is fruitless to ask. The clocks of the world stood still or should have done.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“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, Gormenghast

“It was as though Cutflower was so glad to be alive that he never lived. Every moment was vivid, a coloured thing, a trill or a crackle of words in the air. Who could imagine, while Cutflower was around, that there were such vulgar monsters as death, birth, love, art and pain around the corner? It was too embarrassing to contemplate. If Cutflower knew of them he kept it secret. Over their gaping and sepulchral deeps he skimmed now here, now there, in his private canoe, changing his course with a flick of his paddle when death's black whale, or the red squid of passion, lifted for a moment its body from the brine.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“Meanwhile Bellgrove had been savouring love's rare aperitif, the ageless language of the eyes.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“Indeed he had worn that piece of furniture - or symbol of bone-laziness - into such a shape as made the descent of any other body than his own into that crater of undulating horsehair a hazardous enterprise.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“By the piss of Satan, pug, your sauce is dangerous!”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“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 the tunnels and the caves of Gormenghast - a tale of another world where such things happened, where stones and bricks and ivy stems and iron could be seen as well as touched and smelt, could be lit and coloured, and where at certain times a radiance shone like honey from the east and the blackness was scaled away, and this thing they called dawn arose above the woods as though the fable had materialized, the legend come to life. It was a night with a bull's mouth. But the mouth was bound and gagged. It was a night with enormous eyes, but they were hooded.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“How merciful a thing is man's ignorance of his immediate future! What a ghastly, paralysing thing it would have been if all those present could have known what was about to happen within a matter of seconds! For nothing short of pre-knowledge could have stopped the occurrence, so suddenly it sprang upon them.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“He had emptied the bright goblet of romance; at a single gulp he had emptied it. The glass of it lay scattered on the floor.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“His mother stood before him like a monument. He saw her great outline through the blur of his weakness and his passion. She made no movement at all.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage. So limp of body that their purple dresses appear no more indicative of housing nerves and sinews than when they hang suspended from their hooks.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“Hold fast
To the law
Of the last
Cold tome,
Where the earth
Of the truth
Lies thick
On the page,
And the loam
Of faith
In the ink
Long fled
From the drone
Of the nib
Flows on
Through the breath
Of the bone
Reborn
In a dawn
Of doom
Where blooms
The rose
For the winds
The child
For the tomb
The thrush
For the hush
Of song,
The corn
For the scythe
And the thorn
In wait
For the heart
Till the last
Of the first
Depart,
And the least
Of the past
Is dust
And the dust
Is lost.
Hold fast!”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“Il castello era silenzioso come un mostro impalato.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“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.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“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, Gormenghast

“For what is more lovable than failure?”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“The castle was round and about them, widespread and as unchartable as a dark day.”
― mervyn peake, Gormenghast

“Forse non siete a conoscenza, ma vostra madre aveva il sangue cattivo. Molto cattivo. Oppure sognate degli ermellini.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“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.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“The rain streamed through the window and splashed on the boards, so that little beads of dust ran to and fro on the floor like globules of mercury.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“As the Earl of Gormenghast he could never be
alone. He could only be lonely.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“What did he want with all this softness of gold light?”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“Mervyn Peake came to fame first as an artist. Before the Second World War he was considered to be one of the best portraitists in England, publishing wonderful studies of writers, actors, and painters.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast