63 quotes
It was not certain what significance the ceremony held, for unfortunately the records were lost, but the formality was no less sacred for being unintelligible.
Titus Groan (1946)
At the back of their personal troubles, hopes and fears, this less immediate trepidation grew, this intangible suggestion of change, that most unforgivable of all heresies.
Titus Groan (1946)
A spider lowered itself, fathom by fathom, on a perilous length of thread and was suddenly transfixed in the path of a sunbeam and, for an instant, was a thing of radiant gold.
Gormenghast (1950)
Once there were islands all a-sprout with palms: and coral reefs and sands as white as milk. What is there now but a vast shambles of the heart? Filth, squalor, and a world of little men.
Titus Alone (1959)
The paper is breathless
Under the hand
And the pencil is poised
Like a warlock's wand.
Poem in The Glassblowers (1950)
The lives of the Outer Dwellers had become almost normal again. Bitterness was their bread and rivalry their wine.
Gormenghast (1950)
It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.
Titus Groan (1946)
O'er seas that have no beaches
To end their waves upon,
I floated with twelve peaches,
A sofa and a swan.
Art should be artless, not heartless.
Titus Alone (1959)
Pompous as only failures can be.
Titus Alone (1959)
If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing—flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it.
Gormenghast (1950)
What had his memory done to her that he should now be seeing a creature so radically at variance with the image that had filled his mind?
Gormenghast (1950)
His face wore the resigned expression of one who knew that the only difference between one day and the next lies in the pages of a calendar.
Gormenghast (1950)
The tremendous gulf between the sexes yawned—and an abyss, terrifying and thrilling, sheer and black as the arbour in which they sat; a darkness wide, dangerous, imponderable and littered with the wrecks of broken bridges.
Gormenghast (1950)
This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.
Titus Groan (1946)
“You have a rough manner,” said Titus. “But you have saved me twice. Why are you helping me?”
“I have no idea,” said Muzzlehatch. “There must be something wrong with my brain.”
Titus Alone (1959)
Leave the stronger
and the lesser
things to me!
Lest that conger
named Vanessa
who is longer
than a dresser
visits thee.
These days a passion to accumulate knowledge of any and every kind consumed him; but only as a means to an end. He must know all things, for only so might he have, when situations arose in the future, a full pack of cards to play from.
Titus Groan (1946)
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.
I saw all of a sudden
No sign of any ship.