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Peake's Progress Quotes
Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
by
Mervyn Peake149 ratings, 4.25 average rating, 19 reviews
Peake's Progress Quotes
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“The vastest things are those we may not learn.
We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How pitiful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the masters of.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How pitiful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the masters of.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
“With people, so with trees
With people, so with trees: where there are groups
Of either, men or trees, some will remain
Aloof while others cluster where one stoops
To breathe some dusky secret. Some complain
And some gesticulate and some are blind;
Some toss their heads above green towns; some freeze
For lack of love in copses of mankind;
Some laugh; some mourn; with people, so with trees.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
With people, so with trees: where there are groups
Of either, men or trees, some will remain
Aloof while others cluster where one stoops
To breathe some dusky secret. Some complain
And some gesticulate and some are blind;
Some toss their heads above green towns; some freeze
For lack of love in copses of mankind;
Some laugh; some mourn; with people, so with trees.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
“To live at all is miracle enough.
The doom of nations is another thing.
Here in my hammering blood-pulse is my proof.
Let every painter paint and poet sing
And all the sons of music ply their trade;
Machines are weaker than a beetle’s wing.
Swung out of sunlight into cosmic shade,
Come what come may the imagination’s heart
Is constellation high and can’t be weighed.
Nor greed nor fear can tear our faith apart
When every heart-beat hammers out the proof
That life itself is miracle enough.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
The doom of nations is another thing.
Here in my hammering blood-pulse is my proof.
Let every painter paint and poet sing
And all the sons of music ply their trade;
Machines are weaker than a beetle’s wing.
Swung out of sunlight into cosmic shade,
Come what come may the imagination’s heart
Is constellation high and can’t be weighed.
Nor greed nor fear can tear our faith apart
When every heart-beat hammers out the proof
That life itself is miracle enough.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
“LION: How do you do? I have heard about you all, and of your Ark. But like many others, I have been an unbeliever. There seemed no reason for a flood, not with the sun shining so splendidly. But yesterday...
MRS. NOAH: What happened yesterday?
LION: I had a twinge.
NOAH: A twinge of what?
LION: The old wound. Here, across my shoulder. It was a deep cut. I was a boy at the time; full of fight, don't you know. It's never really healed.
[Pause]
NOAH: What has that to do with the flood?
LION: As I say, it never really healed; may I sit down? [He sits down immediately below the seaweed.] You see, it's like this. When the weather is unsettled, then my wound begins to pang.
ALL: Pang?
LION: To have pangs, then... really! And the bigger the pangs, the bigger the storm to follow. Of course I've never heard of a big enough storm to warrant THIS. But there's something on its way all right. [Settles down to a boring story.] Why, I remember once, when I was a cub, my father said 'Leo, my boy, whenever...”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
MRS. NOAH: What happened yesterday?
LION: I had a twinge.
NOAH: A twinge of what?
LION: The old wound. Here, across my shoulder. It was a deep cut. I was a boy at the time; full of fight, don't you know. It's never really healed.
[Pause]
NOAH: What has that to do with the flood?
LION: As I say, it never really healed; may I sit down? [He sits down immediately below the seaweed.] You see, it's like this. When the weather is unsettled, then my wound begins to pang.
ALL: Pang?
LION: To have pangs, then... really! And the bigger the pangs, the bigger the storm to follow. Of course I've never heard of a big enough storm to warrant THIS. But there's something on its way all right. [Settles down to a boring story.] Why, I remember once, when I was a cub, my father said 'Leo, my boy, whenever...”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
“[More things are thrown down from above. The last object to descend from above lands again on DEVIUS's bed. It is a golly-wog.]
[...]
SALLY [looking at golly-wog]:
Don't touch him father!
DEVIUS: Why, what's the matter, girl?
SALLY [lifting up the golly-wog]:
How dared they touch him!
How many times I drenched him with my tears.
I have dried up - since then.
[...]
Oh, I was real then. My tears were true.
PERCY [to golly-wog]:
Give me the rocking-horse.
Where have you been? Why did she banish you?
Was she afraid you might be treacherous
And tell the wide world where she kept her heart?
Was she afraid she might become herself
At some forgetful moment? Eh?
Ah, Dobbin, Dobbin.
To be oneself! To be oneself again!
For I am choked with falsity and long
To walk and talk with nothing on my back.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
[...]
SALLY [looking at golly-wog]:
Don't touch him father!
DEVIUS: Why, what's the matter, girl?
SALLY [lifting up the golly-wog]:
How dared they touch him!
How many times I drenched him with my tears.
I have dried up - since then.
[...]
Oh, I was real then. My tears were true.
PERCY [to golly-wog]:
Give me the rocking-horse.
Where have you been? Why did she banish you?
Was she afraid you might be treacherous
And tell the wide world where she kept her heart?
Was she afraid she might become herself
At some forgetful moment? Eh?
Ah, Dobbin, Dobbin.
To be oneself! To be oneself again!
For I am choked with falsity and long
To walk and talk with nothing on my back.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
“Is he 'abstract', or 'extract'? Cubish or tube-ist? A figmentist? Or pigmentist?”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
“… tension is the opposite of peace - but tension is the brother of silence.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
“Poem
Out of the overlapping
Leaves of my brain came tapping…
Tapping… a voice that is not mine alone:
Nor can the woodpecker
Claim it as his own: the flicker
Deep in the foliage belongs to neither
Birds, men or dreams.
It is as far away as childhood seems.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
Out of the overlapping
Leaves of my brain came tapping…
Tapping… a voice that is not mine alone:
Nor can the woodpecker
Claim it as his own: the flicker
Deep in the foliage belongs to neither
Birds, men or dreams.
It is as far away as childhood seems.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
“Blake
When I remember how his spirits throve
Amid dark city streets he did not see
Because his eyes were veiled with poetry
And at his heart the Prophets wings were wove,
When I recall the squalor of his days
And then remember what rare fire was spent
When amid quenchless words he died, I praise
Whatever Gods we’re his, in wonderment”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
When I remember how his spirits throve
Amid dark city streets he did not see
Because his eyes were veiled with poetry
And at his heart the Prophets wings were wove,
When I recall the squalor of his days
And then remember what rare fire was spent
When amid quenchless words he died, I praise
Whatever Gods we’re his, in wonderment”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
“Proliferation of artistic achievement on this scale is rare enough, most writers and artists tending to concentrate on what they consider, not always correctly, to be their strongest outlet. Peake, on the other hand, put the same energy and technical expertise into whatever he did. It was as if the huge creative fire burning in him touched everything he attempted, so that even in the slightest and lightest of his work there is something of that inner intensity...
Perhaps Henri Bergson’s élan vital, the impulse of life, lay at the basis of Mervyn Peake’s work. He could call, at any time, upon the creativity he needed. It did not matter whether he attempted a book, a play, a painting, a poem or an illustration. In each and all of them, there was the same manifestation of inner luminous strength of life. It is this fact that gives his work, whether light or serious, its special feel. We are constantly in touch, through him, with something far greater than ourselves.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
Perhaps Henri Bergson’s élan vital, the impulse of life, lay at the basis of Mervyn Peake’s work. He could call, at any time, upon the creativity he needed. It did not matter whether he attempted a book, a play, a painting, a poem or an illustration. In each and all of them, there was the same manifestation of inner luminous strength of life. It is this fact that gives his work, whether light or serious, its special feel. We are constantly in touch, through him, with something far greater than ourselves.”
― Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings
