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There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.

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
Stillness
Times
Cruel
Mortals
Edge
Edges
Air
Scythes
Scythe
Silence
Floats
Becomes

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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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.
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For what use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook's nest with every twig a duty.
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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 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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Cold love’s the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized.
Mervyn Peake
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Something to remember, that: cats for missiles.
Mervyn Peake
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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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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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I am too rich already, for my eyes Mint gold, while my heart cries.
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
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I am the wilderness lost in man.
Mervyn Peake
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Why break the heart that never beat from love?
Mervyn Peake
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It was not certain what significance the ceremony held... but the formality was no less sacred for it being unintelligible
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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[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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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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Oh how I hate people!
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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Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.
Mervyn Peake