Countless candles dribbled with hot wax, and their flames, like little flags, fluttered in the unchartered currents of air. Thousands of lamps, naked, or shuttered behind coloured glass, burned with their glows of purple, amber, grass-green, blue, blood red and even grey. The walls of Gormenghast were like the walls of paradise or like the walls of an inferno. The colours were devilish or angelical according to the colour of the mind that watched them. They swam, those walls, with the hues of hell, with the tints of Zion. The breasts of the plumaged seraphim; the scales of Satan.

To live at all is miracle enough.

Why break the heart that never beat from love?

Yet not with all of me am I in love. Too much of my own quietness is with me.

Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.

Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one's face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.

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.