Mervyn Peake quotes - page 3

It was thought that he had genius, if only because he had been able to delegate his duties in so intricate a way that there was never any need for him to do anything at all. His signature, which was necessary from time to time at the end of long notices which no one read, was always faked, and even the ingenious system of delegation whereon his greatness rested was itself worked out by another. (Mervyn Peake)
An aching to be once again in the land from which he grew gave him no rest. There is no calm for those who are uprooted. They are wanderers, homesick and defiant. Love itself is helpless to heal them though the dust rises with every footfall-drifts down the corridors-settles on branch or cornice-each breath an inhalation from the past so that the lungs, like a miner's, are dark with bygone times. Whatever they eat, whatever they drink, is never the bread of home or the corn of their own valleys. It is never the wine of their own vineyards. It is a foreign brew. View quote
Mervyn Peake
This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame. View quote
Mervyn Peake
So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage. View quote
Mervyn Peake
There he was. The infant Titus. His eyes were open but he was quite still. The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet. Earth's passions, earth's griefs, earth's incongruous, ridiculous humours-dormant, yet visible in the wry pippin of a face. View quote
Mervyn Peake
A spider lowered itself, fathom by fathom, on a perilous length of thread and was suddenly transfixed in the path of a sunbeam and, for an instant, was a thing of radiant gold. View quote
Mervyn Peake
At an ink-stained desk, with his chin cupped in his hands, Titus was contemplating, as in a dream, the chalk-marks on the blackboard. They represented a sum in short division, but might as well have been some hieroglyphic message from a moonstruck prophet to his lost tribe a thousand years ago. View quote
Mervyn Peake
He was as young as twenty years allowed, and as old as it could make him. View quote
Mervyn Peake
His face wore the resigned expression of one who knew that the only difference between one day and the next lies in the pages of a calendar. View quote
Mervyn Peake
Leave the stronger and the lesser things to me! Lest that conger named Vanessa who is longer than a dresser visits thee. View quote
Mervyn Peake
Once there were islands all a-sprout with palms: and coral reefs and sands as white as milk. What is there now but a vast shambles of the heart? Filth, squalor, and a world of little men. (Mervyn Peake)
The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity. View quote
Mervyn Peake
It was not possible for him to visit his library as often as he wished, for the calls made upon him by the endless ceremonials which were his exacting duty to perform robbed him for many hours each day of his only pleasure-books. View quote
Mervyn Peake
What had his memory done to her that he should now be seeing a creature so radically at variance with the image that had filled his mind? View quote
Mervyn Peake
"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. View quote
Mervyn Peake
His days were full of meaningless ceremonies whose sacredness appeared to be in inverse ratio to their comprehensibility or usefulness. View quote
Mervyn Peake
He was meaner, more irritable, more impatient for the ultimate power which could only be his through the elimination of all rivals; and if he had ever had any scruples, any love at all for even a monkey, a book, or a sword-hilt, all this, and even this, had been cauterized and drowned away. View quote
Mervyn Peake
The summer was heavy with a kind of soft grey-blue weight in the sky-yet not in the sky, for it was as though there were no sky, but only air, an impalpable grey-blue substance, drugged with the weight of its own heat and hue. View quote
Mervyn Peake
The ritual which his body had had to perform for fifty years had been no preparation for the unexpected. View quote
Mervyn Peake
There is no point in erecting a structure,” said Muzzlehatch, taking no notice of Titus's question, "unless someone else pulls it down. There is no value in a rule until it is broken. There is nothing in life unless there is death at the back of it. Death, dear boy, leaning over the edge of the world and grinning like a boneyard. View quote
Mervyn Peake
They knew now that they could never accomplish that long carpet-journey with anything like Cutflower's air, but he reminded them at every footstep, every inclination of the head, that the whole point of life was to be happy. (Mervyn Peake)
I saw all of a sudden No sign of any ship. View quote
Mervyn Peake
I am a beggar.” "You are a travesty,” said Titus, "and when you die the earth will breathe again. View quote
Mervyn Peake
And yet, though his eyes shone with the thrill of his discovery, he suffered at the same time a pang of resentment-a resentment that this alien realm should be able to exist in a world that appeared to have no reference to his home and which seemed, in fact, supremely self-sufficient. View quote
Mervyn Peake
This extreme air of abstraction, of empty and bland removedness, was almost terrifying. It was that kind of unconcern that humbled the ardent, the passionate of nature, and made them wonder why they were expending so much energy of body and spirit when every day but led them to the worms. Deadyawn, by temperament or lack of it, achieved unwittingly what wise men crave: equipoise. View quote
Mervyn Peake