117 Quotes by Mervyn Peake

  • Author Mervyn Peake
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    There is a brotherhood among the kindly- Closer and defter and more integral- Than any of aisle or coven- For love rang out before the chapel bell.

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  • Author Mervyn Peake
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    It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.

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  • Author Mervyn Peake
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    Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one’s face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.

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  • Author Mervyn Peake
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    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.

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  • Author Mervyn Peake
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    Of Swelter’s acreage, only a perch or two here and there might, if broken, prove vulnerable loam. That he bled profusely could prove little. There was blood in him to revitalize an anaemic army, with enough left over to cool the guns. Placed end to end, his blood vessels might have coiled up the Tower of Flints and half way down again like a Virginia creeper – a vampire’s home from home.

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  • Author Mervyn Peake
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    The sun sank with a sob and darkness waded in from all horizons so that the sky contracted and there was no more light left in the world, when, at this very moment of annihilation, the moon, as though she had been waiting for her cue, sailed up the night.

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  • Author Mervyn Peake
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    Every blade of the grass was of consequence, and the few scattered stones held an authority that made their solid, separate marks upon the brain – each one with its own unduplicated shape: each rising brightly from the ink of its own spilling.

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  • Author Mervyn Peake
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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.

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  • Author Mervyn Peake
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    Let them touch him. For every hair that’s hurt I’ll stop a heart.

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