From daybreak to sunset she turned her thoughts, like boulders, over. She set them in long lines. She rearranged their order…

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?

Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from...

But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man’s-land, over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of...

She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.

Oh how I hate people!

To say that the frozen silence contracted itself into a yet higher globe of ice were to under-rate the exquisite tension and to shroud it in words. The atmosphere had become a physical sensation. As...

I sometimes think about old tombs and weedsThat interwreathe among the bones of kingsWith cold and poisonous berry and black flower:Or ruminate upon the skulls of steedsFrailer than shells and on those luminous wings -The...

Civilized people don’t feel.

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...

…another comber of far pleasure followed the first, for his books came suddenly before his eyes, row upon row of volumes, row upon priceless row of calf-bound Thought, of philosophy and fiction, of travel and...

Swelter, as soon as he saw who it was, stopped dead, and across his face little billows of flesh ran swiftly here and there until, as though they had determined to adhere to the same...

I want a big breakfast,” said Fuchsia at last. “I want a lot to eat, I’m going to think today.

This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by...

Why break the heart that never beat from love?

I am too rich already, for my eyes mint gold.- Coloured Money

I, while the gods laugh, the world’s vortex am;Maelström of passions in that hidden seaWhose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me;And in small compass the dark waters cram.- I, While the Gods Laugh,...

His mother stood before him like a monument. He saw her great outline through the blur of his weakness and his passion. She made no movement at all.

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...

The Aunts put their arms about one another so that their faces were cheek to cheek, and from this doublehead they gazed up at Steerpike with a row of four equidistant eyes. There was no...

He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.

One thing at a time,’ said the Boy. ‘You must be patient. This is a day of hope and wild revenge. Do not interrupt me. I am a courier from another world. I bring you...

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...

What is Time, O sister of similar features, that you speak of it so subserviently? Are we to be the slaves of the sun, that secondhand overrated knob of gilt, or of his sister, that...

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. But on an occasion such as this it was...

In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible...

How’s the blood-stream, my dear, invaluable little woman? How’s the blood-stream?”…”It’s quite comfortable, sir…I think, sir, thank you.”…”Aha!”…”a comfortable stream, is it? Aha! v-e-r-y good. V-e-r-y good. Dawdling ‘twixt hill and hill, no doubt. Meandering...

Each day we live is a glass roomUntil we break it with the thrustingOf the spirit and pass throughThe splintered walls to the green pasturesWhere the birds and buds are breakingInto fabulous song and hueBy...

For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless.

Meanwhile Bellgrove had been savouring love’s rare aperitif, the ageless language of the eyes.

To live at all is miracle enough.

She had shown him by her independence how it was only fear that held people together. The fear of being alone and the fear of being different.

Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.

And then he began to laugh in a peculiar way of his own which was both violent and soundless. His heavy reclining body, draped in its black gown, heaved to and fro. His knees drew...

The road was wet with rain, black and shiny like oilskin. The reflection of the street lamps wallowed like yellow jelly-fish. A bus was approaching – a bus to Piccadilly, a bus to the never-never...

Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.

If seeing her an hour before her lastWeak cough into all blackness I could yetBe held by chalk-white walls- The Consumptive. Belsen 1945

Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargoCongealed in the dark arteries,Old veinsThat hold Glamorgan’s blood.The midnight miner in the secret seams,Limb, life, and bread.- Rhondda Valley