The Gormenghast Novels Quotes

“If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing - flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it. High-shouldered to a degree little short of malformation, slender and adroit of limb and frame, his eyes close-set and the colour of dried blood, 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, The Gormenghast Novels

“There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“Cold love’s the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings a hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls … falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heart’s condition. And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky, and the sun is like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted. The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast and bloody. And then the great winds come and the sky is blown naked, and a wild bird screams across the glittering land. And the Countess stands at the window of her room with the white cats at her feet and stares at the frozen landscape spread below her, and a year later she is standing there again but the cats are abroad in the valleys and a raven sits upon her heavy shoulder. And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy. 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. And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“I want a big breakfast," said Fuchsia at last. "I want a lot to eat, I'm going to think today.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“Home is a room dappled with firelight: there are pictures and books. And when the rain sighs, and the acorns fall, there are patterns of leaves against the drawn curtains. Home is where I was safe. Home is what I fled from.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“His youth had been so long ago that he could remember nothing of it but he presumed, erroneously, that he had tasted the purple fruit, had broken hearts and hymens, had tosses flowers to ladies on balconies, had drunk champagne out of their shoes and generally been irresistible.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy

“Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to re-tie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened her-self she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room. This high, narrow avenue wound down the centre of the first attic before suddenly turning at a sharp angle to the right. The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. She knew of ways through the centre of what appeared to be hills of furniture, boxes, musical instruments and toys, kites, pictures, bamboo armour and helmets, flags and relics of every kind, as an Indian knows his green and secret trail. Within reach of her hand the hide and head of a skinned baboon hung dustily over a broken drum that rose above the dim ranges of this attic medley. Huge and impregnable they looked in the warm still half-light, but Fuchsia, had she wished to, could have disappeared awkwardly but very suddenly into these fantastic mountains, reached their centre and lain down upon an ancient couch with a picture book at her elbow and been entirely lost to view within a few moments.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“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.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“Words can be tiresome as a swarm of insects. They can prick and buzz! Words can be no more than a series of farts; or on the other hand they can be adamantine, obdurate, inviolable, stone upon stone.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“I was brooding, boy. Than which there is no richer pastime. It muffles one with rotting plumes. It gives forth sullen music. It is the smell of home.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings a hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls … falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heart’s condition.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“She was not in love with Rantel: she was in love with what he meant to her as someone she could love.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“This ancient span of furniture was littered with textbooks, blue pencils, pipes filled to various depths with white ash and dottle, pieces of chalk, a sock, several bottles of ink, a bamboo walking-cane, a pool of white glue, a chart of the solar system, burned away over a large portion of its surface through some past accident with a bottle of acid, a stuffed cormorant with tin-tacks through its feet, which had no effect in keeping the bird upright; a faded globe, with the words ‘Cane Slypate Thursday’ scrawled in yellow chalk across it from just below the equator to well into the Arctic Circle; any number of lists, notices, instructions; a novel called ‘The Amazing Adventures of Cupid Catt’, and at least a dozen high ragged pagodas of buff-coloured copybooks. Perch-Prism had cleared a small space at the far end of this table, and there he squatted, his arms folded.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“I have lingered in the cloisters Of the Northern wing at night, As the sky unclasped its oysters On the midnight pearls of light. For the long remorseless shadows Chilled me with exquisite fear. I have lingered in cold meadows Through a month of rain, my dear. Come my Love, my sweet, my Only, Through the parapets of Groan. Lingering can be very lonely When one lingers on one’s own. In dark alcoves I have lingered Conscious of dead dynasties. I have lingered in blue cellars And in hollow trunks of trees, Many a traveller through moonlight Passing by a winding stair Or a cold and crumbling archway Has been shocked to see me there.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“Through honeycombs of stone would now be wandering the passions in their clay. There would be tears and there would be strange laughter. Fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings. And dreams and violence and disenchantment.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“[…] what haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy

“Then slowly, as his erratic shape approached the next guttering aura he would begin by degrees to become a silhouette, until immediately before the candle he would for a moment appear like an inky scarecrow, a mantis of pitch-black cardboard worked with strings.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing - flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“Before it had awoke to die on the instant of its waking, a score of bells and clocks had shouted midday and for a minute after its death, from near and far the clappers in their tents of rusted iron clanged across Gormenghast.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“Would you be so kind as to remove your redundant carcass from the door of this room, my man,’ he said, in his high, abstracted voice; ‘and keep it in the kitchen, where it is paid to do this and that among the saucepans, I believe … would you? No one rang for you. Your mistress’ voice, though high, is nothing like the ringing of a bell … nothing at all.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“And so Titus laughed, and as he laughed, high-pitched and uncontrolled (for at the back of it all he was scared and little relished the idea of being singled out, pin-pointed, and examined by a mechanical brain), while he laughed, he began at the same time to run, for there was something ominous in the air, ominous and ludicrous – something that told him that to stay any longer on this marble tract was to court trouble, to be held a vagrant, a spy, or a madman.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“I am alone', she said, her chin in her hands and her elbows on the sill. 'I am quite alone, like I enjoy it. Now I can think for there's no one to provoke me here. Not in my room. No one to tell me what I ought to do because I'm a Lady. Oh no. I do just what I like here. Fuchsia is quite alright here. None of them knows where I go to. Flay doesn't know. Father doesn't know. Mother doesn't know. None of them knows. Even Nannie doesn't know. Only I know. I know where I go, I go here. This is where I go.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“Slagg,' said the Countess, 'go away! I would like to see the boy when he is six. Find a wet nurse from the Outer Dwellings. Make him green dresses from the velvet curtains. Take this gold ring of mine. Fix a chain to it. Let him wear it around his wry little neck. Call him Titus. Go away and leave the door six inches open.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“Rottcodd was unmarried. An aloofness and even a nervousness was apparent on first acquaintance and the ladies held a peculiar horror for him.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“Silence, you kitchen thing. Hold your tongue you greasy fork. Talk too much.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels

“Oh, bluebottle, you would fare ill at a ball! There would be none who could dance better than you; but you would be shunned: you would be too original: you would be before your time.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

“When the door was closed upon the last of them the leather room was, indeed, no place for anyone with asthma. No flowers could flourish there unless, indeed, some gaunt and horny thing – some cactus long inured to dust and thirst. No singing birds could thrive – no, not the raven, even; for smoke would fill their thin, sweet windpipes. It knew nothing, this atmosphere, of fragrant pastures – of dawn among the dew-bright hazel woods – or rivulets or starlight. It was a leather cave of sepia fog.”
― Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy