117 Quotes by Mervyn Peake

This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.

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.

I enjoy the fantastic and the sheer excitement of having a sheet of white paper and a pen in one’s hand and no dictator on earth can say what word I put down – I put down what I want to put down.

Each day we live is a glass roomUntil we break it with the thrustingOf the spirit and pass throughThe splintered walls to the green pasturesWhere the birds and buds are breakingInto fabulous song and hueBy the still waters.- Each Day We Live is a Glass Room

Why break the heart that never beat from love?

In great thick dusty books he readAnd hardly ever went to bedBefore it was eleven.- One Day When They Had Settled Down

The crumbs blow free down the pointless seaTo the beat of a cakey heartAnd the sensitive steel of the knife can feelThat love is a race apartIn the speed of the lingering light are blownThe crumbs to the hake above, And the tropical air vibrates to the droneOf a cake in the throes of love.

The Aunts put their arms about one another so that their faces were cheek to cheek, and from this doublehead they gazed up at Steerpike with a row of four equidistant eyes. There was no reason why there should not have been forty, or four hundred of them. It so happened that only four had been removed from a dead and endless frieze whose inexhaustible and repetitive theme was forever, eyes, eyes, eyes.