22 quotes
There is danger in deep water, and danger is more real than beauty in a boy’s mind.
Gormenghast (1950)
There is something about a swarm that is damaging to the pride of its individual members.
Gormenghast (1950)
His days were full of meaningless ceremonies whose sacredness appeared to be in inverse ratio to their comprehensibility or usefulness.
Gormenghast (1950)
Other people’s faults can be fascinating. One’s own are dreary.
Gormenghast (1950)
This upstart, this dangerous, unprecedented upstart, whose pursuit of the doctrines was propelled by a greed for personal power as cold as it was tameless.
Gormenghast (1950)
There are times when the emotions are so clamorous and the rational working of the mind so perfunctory that there is no telling where the actual leaves off and the images of fantasy begin.
Gormenghast (1950)
So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage.
Gormenghast (1950)
The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity.
Gormenghast (1950)
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)
The lives of the Outer Dwellers had become almost normal again. Bitterness was their bread and rivalry their wine.
Gormenghast (1950)
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)
How merciful a thing is man’s ignorance of his immediate future! What a ghastly, paralysing thing it would have been if all those present could have known what was about to happen within a matter of seconds!
Gormenghast (1950)
He knew that he was caught up in one of those stretches of time when for anything to happen normally would be abnormal. The dawn was too tense and highly charged for any common happening to survive.
Gormenghast (1950)
They knew now that they could never accomplish that long carpet-journey with anything like Cutflower’s air, but he reminded them at every footstep, every inclination of the head, that the whole point of life was to be happy.
Gormenghast (1950)
Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracks. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river.
Gormenghast (1950)
At an ink-stained desk, with his chin cupped in his hands, Titus was contemplating, as in a dream, the chalk-marks on the blackboard. They represented a sum in short division, but might as well have been some hieroglyphic message from a moonstruck prophet to his lost tribe a thousand years ago.
Gormenghast (1950)
It was thought that he had genius, if only because he had been able to delegate his duties in so intricate a way that there was never any need for him to do anything at all. His signature, which was necessary from time to time at the end of long notices which no one read, was always faked, and even the ingenious system of delegation whereon his greatness rested was itself worked out by another.
Gormenghast (1950)