His staff had shaken hands with her as though a woman was merely another kind of man. Fools! The seeds of Eve were in this radiant creature. The lullabyes of half a million years throbbed in her throa...
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.
For answer Mr Flay shot his head forward out of his collar and croaked, ‘Silence! you kitchen thing. Hold your tongue you greasy fork.
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 eno...
The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet.
Steerpike was, of course, alive with ideas and projects. These two half-witted women were a gift. That they should be the sisters of Lord Sepulchrave was of tremendous strategic value. They would prov...
I want a big breakfast, said Fuchsia at last. I want a lot to eat, I'm going to think today.
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 tra...
The crumbs blow free down the pointless seaTo the beat of a cakey heartAnd the sensitive steel of the knife can feelThat love is a race apartIn the speed of the lingering light are blownThe crumbs to...
Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.
He is climbing the spiral staircase of the soul of Gormenghast, bound for some pinnacle of the itching fancy - some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to himself; where he can watch the world spread...
He had emptied the bright goblet of romance; at a single gulp he had emptied it. The glass of it lay scattered on the floor.
She stepped outwards into the dim atmosphere, and falling, was most fabulously lit by the moon and the sun.
Why break the heart that never beat from love?
Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other...
The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in the...
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 reason why the...
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.
I said she was wicked, and she said that everyone was – everyone and everything except rivers, clouds, and some rabbits.
His mind had been working away behind his high forehead. Unimaginative himself he could recognize imagination in her: he had come upon one whose whole nature was the contradiction of his own. He knew...