Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1) QUOTES

61 " Don’t you think so? Don’t you think so?’ ‘I am far beyond thinking, bone of my bone. Far, far beyond thinking, I hand over the reins to you, Irma. Mount and be gone. The world awaits you. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

62 " 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. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

63 " He could now inhabit the world of words, with, at the back of his melancholy, a solace he had not known before "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

64 " ...she stepped outwards into the dim atmosphere, and falling, was most fabulously lit by the moon and the sun. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

65 " 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 , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

66 " His voice is unmuffled - it is like a bell, clearly ringing in the night of our confusion; but the clarity is the clarity of imponderable depth... "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

67 " The accent was of so weird a lilt that at first Steerpike could not recognize more than one sentence in three, but he had quickly attuned himself to the original cadence and as the words fell into place Steerpike realized that he was staring at a poet. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

68 " Mind the corner of that chair, my very dear Mrs Slagg, and oh! my dear woman, you must look where you’re going, by all that’s circumspect, you really must. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

69 " Here and there a thin beam of light threaded the warm brooding dusk and was filled with slowly moving motes like an attenuate firmament of stars revolving in grave order. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

70 " Thereon were seated in a hundred decorative attitudes, or stood immobile like carvings, or walked superbly across their sapphire setting, interweaving with each other like a living arabesque, a swarm of snowwhite cats. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

71 " During the first half of this early period only two major ceremonies befell the child and of these Titus was happily unaware, namely the christening, which took place twelve days after his birth, and a ceremonial breakfast on his first birthday. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

72 " Titus watched Keda’s face with his violet eyes, his grotesque little features modified by the dull light at the corner of the passage. There was the history of man in his face. A fragment from the enormous rock of mankind. A leaf from the forest of man’s passion and man’s knowledge and man’s pain. That was the ancientness of Titus. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

73 " These three sere beings at the shadowy corner waited on. Nannie was sixtynine, Keda was twenty-two, Titus was twelve days old. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

74 " As he trilled, as he prattled, as he indulged in his spontaneous ‘conceits’, as he gestured, fop-like and grotesque, his magnified eyes skidding to and fro behind the lenses of his glasses, like soap at the bottom of a bath, his brain was often other-where, and these days it was well occupied. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

75 " It took place to the accompaniment of such hideous swearing as caused his withered leg to blush beneath the sacking. It must have been hardened by many years of oaths, but this morning an awakened sense of shame at what the upper part of the body could descend to, raddled it from hip to toe. Its only consolation was that the contaminating influence had not descended lower than the lungs, and what diseases the withered leg experienced were entirely physical. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

76 " It was only when these nefarious doings were satisfactorily completed that Steerpike visited the aunts for the second time and re-primed them in their very simple rôles as arsonists. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

77 " Aren’t there any, dear?’ ‘No,’ said Fuchsia. ‘Why aren’t there?’ Fuchsia realized that Mrs Slagg knew virtually nothing, but the long custom of asking her questions was a hard one to break down. This realization that grown-ups did not necessarily know any more than children was something against which she had fought. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

78 " Never having had either positive cruelty or kindness shown to her by her parents, but only an indifference, she was not conscious of what it was that she missed – affection. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

79 " Not only were the books lost and the thoughts in the books, but what was to him, perhaps, the most searching loss of all, the hours of rumination which lifted him above himself and bore him upon their muffled and enormous wings. Not a day passed but he was reminded of some single volume, or of a series of works, whose very positions on the walls was so clearly indented in his mind. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

80 " It was a long head.

It was a wedge, a sliver, a grotesque slice in which it seemed the features had been forced to stake their claims, and it appeared that they had done so in a great hurry and with no attempt to form any kind of symmetrical pattern for their mutual advantage. The nose had evidently been first upon the scene and had spread itself down the entire length of the wedge, beginning among the grey stubble of the hair and ending among the grey stubble of the beard, and spreading on both sides with a ruthless disregard for the eyes and mouth which found precarious purchase. The mouth was forced by the lie of the terrain left to it, to slant at an angle which gave to its right-hand side an expression of grim amusement and to its left, which dipped downwards across the chin, a remorseless twist. It was forced by not only the unfriendly monopoly of the nose, but also by the tapering character of the head to be a short mouth; but it obvious by its very nature that, under normal conditions, it would have covered twice the area. The eyes in whose expression might be read the unending grudge they bore against the nose were as small as marbles and peered out between the grey grass of the hair.
This head, set at a long incline upon a neck as wry as a turtle's cut across the narrow vertical black strip of the window.
Steerpike watched it turn upon the neck slowly. It would not have surprised him if it had dropped off, so toylike was its angle.
As he watched, fascinated, the mouth opened and a voice as strange and deep as the echo of a lugubrious ocean stole out into the morning. Never was a face so belied by its voice.
The accent was of so weird a lilt that at first Steerpike could not recognize more than one sentence in three, but he had quickly attuned himself to the original cadence and as the words fell into place Steerpike realised he was staring at a poet. "

― Mervyn Peake , Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)