Boy in Darkness Quotes

“One thing at a time,' said the Boy. 'You must be patient. This is a day of hope and wild revenge. Do not interrupt me. I am a courier from another world. I bring you golden words.

Listen!' said the Boy. 'Where I come from there is no more fear. But there is a roaring and a bellowing and a cracking of bones. And sometimes there is silence when, lolling on your thrones, your slaves adore you.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness and Other Stories

“It was then that the Boy went through his darkest hell of all: the long ache of his body, acute as it was, was yet forgotten or disposed of in some way, for he was filled with a disembodied pain, an illness so penetrating, so horrible, that had he been given the opportunity to die he would have taken it. No normal sensation could find a way through this overpowering nausea of the soul that filled him.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness and Other Stories

“But it was their eyes that were appalling, for they were that kind of bright and acid yellow that allowed no other colour alongside and, if a colour can have any moral value, was ineradicably wicked.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness

“For there can be a need for hateful things, and a hatred of what is, in a strange way, loved. And so a child flies to what it recognizes for recognition's sake. But to be alone in a land where nothing can be recognized, that is what he feared, and that is what he longed for. For what is exploration without peril?”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness

“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.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness and Other Stories

“There was, nevertheless, a chip of granite at the heart of the Boy. Something obdurate. There was also something in his head. It was a brain.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness

“His long jacket, so black in the semi-darkness, had about it, in the sunlight, a greenish tinge that suggested decay.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness

“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.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness

“His whole life had been swamped with ceremony, and his happiest moments were when he was alone.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness

“He longed (he knew it now) to turn his anger into action—to make his escape from the gaols of precedent; to make a bid if not for final freedom then at least for a day. For a day. For one tremendous day of insurrection.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness

“Take him away at once,' he whispered, 'and when this coma leaves him, and when he is fed and strong again, return him to me. For he is what your white lord has awaited. His very bones cry out for realignment; his flesh to be reshaped; his heart to be shrivelled, and his soul to feed on fear.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness

“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.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness and Other Stories