It was not certain what significance the ceremony held... but the formality was no less sacred for it being unintelligible

There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.

Oh how I hate people!

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.

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 away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.

I want a lot to eat, I'm going to think today.

Cold love’s the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized.