Gormenghast Quotes

• Countless candles dribbled with hot wax, and their flames, like little flags, fluttered in the unchartered currents of air. Thousands of lamps, naked, or shuttered behind coloured glass, burned with their glows of purple, amber, grass-green, blue, blood red and even grey. The walls of Gormenghast were like the walls of paradise or like the walls of an inferno. The colours were devilish or angelical according to the colour of the mind that watched them. They swam, those walls, with the hues of hell, with the tints of Zion. The breasts of the plumaged seraphim; the scales of Satan.

  Mervyn Peake

  Wall, Purple, Glasses

  Mervyn Peake (2007). “Gormenghast”, p.226, The Overlook Press

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• Each day I live in a glass room unless I break it with the thrusting of my senses and pass through the splintered walls to the great landscape.

  Mervyn Peake

  Wall, Glasses, Great Day

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• [Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.

  Mervyn Peake

  Dream, Book, Giving

  Mervyn Peake (2011). “The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy”, Random House

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• Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around it s Outer Walls.

  Mervyn Peake

  Wall, Taken, Mean

  Mervyn Peake (2007). “Titus Groan”, p.12, The Overlook Press

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• Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age.

  Mervyn Peake

  Age, Three, World

  Mervyn Peake (1995). “The Gormenghast Novels”, Overlook Books

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• Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre.

  David Gemmell

  Children, Writing, Garden

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• Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.

  Mervyn Peake

  Life Is

  Mervyn Peake (2007). “Titus Groan”, p.230, The Overlook Press

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• He had no longer any need for home, for he carried his Gormenghast within him. All that he sought was jostling within himself. He had grown up. What a boy had set out to seek a man had found, found by the act of living.

  Mervyn Peake

  Home, Boys, Men

  Mervyn Peake (2008). “Titus Alone”, p.268, The Overlook Press

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• When he at least reached the door the handle had cease to vibrate. Lowering himself suddenly to his knees he placed his head and the vagaries of his left eye (which was for ever trying to dash up and down the vertical surface of the door), he was able by dint of concentration to observe, within three inches of his keyholed eye, an eye which was not his, being not only of a different colour to his own iron marble, but being, which is more convincing, on the other side of the door.

  Mervyn Peake

  Eye, Doors, Iron

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