117 Quotes by Mervyn Peake

Meanwhile Bellgrove had been savouring love's rare aperitif, the ageless language of the eyes.

Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargoCongealed in the dark arteries,Old veinsThat hold Glamorgan's blood.The midnight miner in the secret seams,Limb, life, and bread.- Rhondda Valley

Bellgrove, eminently lovable, because of his individual weakness, his incompetence, his failure as a man, a scholar, a leader or even as a companion, was neverless utterly alone. For the weak, above all, have their friends. Yet his gentleness, his pretence at authority, his palpable humanity were unable, for some reason or other, to function. He was demonstrably the type of venerable and absent-minded professor about whom all the sharp-beaked boys of the world should swarm.

His mother stood before him like a monument. He saw her great outline through the blur of his weakness and his passion. She made no movement at all.

I sometimes think about old tombs and weedsThat interwreathe among the bones of kingsWith cold and poisonous berry and black flower:Or ruminate upon the skulls of steedsFrailer than shells and on those luminous wings -The shoulder blades of Princes of fled power,Which now the unrecorded sandstorms grindInto so wraith-like a translucencyOf tissue-thin and aqueous bone- A Reverie of Bone

Before man's bravery I bow my head:More so when valour is unnaturalAnd fear, a bat between the shoulder-bladesFlaps its cold webs - but I am ill at easeWith propaganda glory, and the liesOf statesmen and the lords of slippery trades.- Before Man's Bravery I Bow My Head May 1941.

[…] what haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness.

So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage. So limp of body that their purple dresses appear no more indicative of housing nerves and sinews than when they hang suspended from their hooks.

His staff had shaken hands with her as though a woman was merely another kind of man. Fools! The seeds of Eve were in this radiant creature. The lullabyes of half a million years throbbed in her throat. Had they no sense of wonder, no reverence, no pride?