James

“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, Titus Groan

“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

“He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

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