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As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.

Mervyn Peake

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Mervyn Peake
Age: 57 †
Born: 1911
Born: July 9
Died: 1968
Died: November 17
Illustrator
Novelist
Painter
Poet
Writer
Mervyn Laurence Peake
Mervyn L. Peake
Mervyn Lawrence Peake
Imagination
Slips
Whip
Effort
Current
Slide
Black
Fish
Whips
Lost
Fishes
Grip
Away
Currents
Slides
Ever
Endless
Slip
Life
Fingers
Oblivion
Startling
Ocean
Exquisite
Ghastly

More quotes by Mervyn Peake

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Years on end, and swords on end - where will it end, if our ears unbend - what shall I spend on a wrinkled friend in a pair of tights like a bunch of lights?
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We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.
Mervyn Peake
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Cold love’s the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized.
Mervyn Peake
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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
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Through her, in microcosm, the wide earth sobbed. The starglobe sank in her the colours faded. The death-dew rose and the wild birds in her breast climbed to her throat and gathered songless, hovering, all tumult, wing to wing, so ardent for those climes where all things end.
Mervyn Peake
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Oh how I hate people!
Mervyn Peake
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I am too rich already, for my eyes Mint gold, while my heart cries.
Mervyn Peake
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Something to remember, that: cats for missiles.
Mervyn Peake
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He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.
Mervyn Peake
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And there shall be a flame-green daybreak soon. And love itself will cry for insurrection! For tomorrow is also a day - and Titus has entered his stronghold.
Mervyn Peake
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For what use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook's nest with every twig a duty.
Mervyn Peake
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I am the wilderness lost in man.
Mervyn Peake
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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
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Mount and begone. The world awaits you.
Mervyn Peake
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Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.
Mervyn Peake
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Why break the heart that never beat from love?
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.
Mervyn Peake
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His was not the hatred that arises suddenly like a storm and as suddenly abates. It was, once the initial shock of anger and pain was over, a calculated thing that grew in a bloodless way.
Mervyn Peake
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What is Time... That you speak of it so subserviently? Are we to be the slaves of the sun, that second-hand, overrated knob of gilt, or of his sister, that fatuous circle of silver paper? A curse upon their ridiculous dictatorship!
Mervyn Peake
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And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?
Mervyn Peake