FastSaying

If seeing her an hour before her last
Weak cough into all blackness I could yet
Be held by chalk-white walls

- The Consumptive. Belsen 1945


Mervyn Peake

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People are not an interruption of our business. People are our business.
A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.
It is hard to look up to a leader who keeps his ear to the ground.
The most wasted day of all is that in which we have not laughed.
The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in men. Ordinary people see no diff...
The intelligence is proved not by ease of learning, but by understanding what we learn.
Communication is something so simple and difficult that we can never put it in simple words.
Like threads of silver seen through crystal beads
Let love through good deeds show.
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
In everyone's heart stirs a great homesickness.
That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.
Our wisdom comes usually from our experience, and our experience comes largely from our experience.
One thing about the school of experience is that it will repeat the lesson if you flunk the first ti...
To reprove small faults within due vehemence, is as absurd as if a man should take a great hammer to...
Faith is like electricity. You can't see it, but you can see the light.
Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it by the handle of anxiety, or by the handle of...
Some families can trace their ancestors back three hundred years, but can't tell you where their chi...
A recent survey was said to prove that the people we Americans most admire are our politicians and d...
If a man defrauds you one time, he is a rascal; if he does it twice, you are a fool.
Flattery looks like friendship, just like a wolf looks like a dog.
Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Courage is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admired when it ...
Freedom also includes the right to mismanage your own affairs.
Let your friends be the friends of your deliberate choice.
The man who has strong opinions and always says what he thinks is courageous - and friendless.
Friendship is love with understanding.
So few people think. When we find one who really does, we call him a genius
Your life can't go according to plan if you have no plan.
Practicing the Golden Rule is not a sacrifice; it is an investment.
Conversation is an exercise of the mind; gossip is merely an exercise of the tongue.
An expert gossiper knows how much to leave out of a conversation
To live so that you would not be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip, is to have li...
Gossip is sometimes referred to as halitosis of the mind
If you would attain greatness, think no little thoughts.
We are born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.
People are changed, not by coercion or intimidation, but by example.
Children are natural mimics; they act like their parents in spite of every effort to teach them good...
The guilty catch themselves.
Good habits are formed; bad habits we fall into.
If happiness could be brought, few of us could pay the price.
Happiness will never come to those who fail to appreciate what they already have.
Happiness is in the heart, not in the circumstances.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Hatred is a boomerang which is sure to hit you harder than the one at whom you throw it.
Hate pollutes the mind.
If we miraculously became the people we hate, how lovable we would find ourselves.
To feel "fit as a fiddle" you must tone down your middle.
Our health always seems much more valuable after we lose it.
A patient going to a doctor for his first visit was asked, "And whom did you consult before coming t...
"Oh," replied his patient, with no malice aforethought, "he told me to come and see you."
It is impossible to make wisdom hereditary.
Honesty is a question of right or wrong, not a matter of policy.
It is a pleasure to give advice, humiliating to need it, normal to ignore it.
It is almost impossible to smile on the outside without feeling better on the inside.
Too many people confine their exercise to jumping to conclusions, running up bills, stretching the t...
Imagination was given man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for ...
Humor - the perfect relationship of the parts to the whole.
Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth - a sense of humor.
"What made the deepest impression upon you?" inquired a friend one day of Lincoln, "when you stood i...
It isn't easy for an idea to squeeze itself into a head filled with prejudice.
Too many people run out of ideas long before they run out of words.
Imagination is the pontoon bridge making way for the timid feet of reason.
Practical observation commonly consists of collecting a few facts and loading them with guesses.
Friendship is a living thing that lasts only as long as it is nourished with kindness, empathy and u...
Having supplied them with names, omnipotence, justice, knowledge, Providence, - what are they?
A good laugh is sunshine in a house.
When you laugh, be sure to laugh at what people do and not at what people are.
One look around us ought to show that all our arbitrary measures and bounds have been clamped on us ...
No punishment of the unrighteous has ever been too severe in the eyes of the righteous.
Why keep on enacting laws when we already have more than we can break.
The best leader is the one who has the sense to surround himself with outstanding people and self-re...
Advice is the only commodity on the market where the supply always exceeds the demand.
Successful men follow the same advice they prescribe for others.
You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea
Old age may seem a long way off. But on the day it doesn't, it will be too late to do anything about...
Age withers only the outside.
Where ambition ends happiness begins.
The best answer to answer to anger is silence.
The size of a man is measured by the size of the thing that makes him angry.
A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.
People who know the least always argue the most.
If you look for the positive things in life; you will find them.
What we are doing at the moment is more that just one thing added to the rest; it is a memoir.
Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes
The human mind must believe in something, so why not let it believe what it does believe.
He that boasts of his own knowledge proclaims his ignorance
It is better to live richly than to die rich.
On his examination paper a boy wrote, "A natural death is where you die by yourself without a doctor...
Many things are worse than defeat,and compromise with evil is one of them.
Desire for security keeps littleness little and threatens the great with smallness.
We cannot be too earnest, too persistent, too determined, about living superior to the herd-instinct...
A college education never hurt anybody who was willing to learn after he got it.
Shortchange your education now and you may be short of change the rest of your life.
Mistakes are a great educator when one is honest enough to admit them and willing to learn from them
Catch your people doing something right and let them know you appreciate it.
Create the kind of climate in your organization where personal growth is expected, recognized and re...
Enthusiasm is very good lubrication for the mind.
Enthusiasm is that kindling spark which marks the difference between the leaders in every activity a...
There are many roads to hate, but envy is the shortest of them all.
The only person worth envying is he person who doesn't envy.

More Mervyn Peake

Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.
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MERVYN PEAKE I am clever enough to know that I am clever.
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MERVYN PEAKE This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of k...
MERVYN PEAKE What is Time... That you speak of it so subserviently? Are we to be the slaves of the sun, that seco...
MERVYN PEAKE In great thick dusty books he read
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Before it was eleven.
...
MERVYN PEAKE She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed beca...
MERVYN PEAKE Civilized people don't feel.
MERVYN PEAKE And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling fro...
MERVYN PEAKE So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage. So limp of body that th...
MERVYN PEAKE I am too rich already, for my eyes mint gold.

- Coloured Money
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MERVYN PEAKE To live at all is miracle enough.
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Of the last
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Where the earth
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MERVYN PEAKE Are you lishening, my pretty vermin, are you lishening?
MERVYN PEAKE Years on end, and swords on end - where will it end, if our ears unbend - what shall I spend on a wr...
MERVYN PEAKE Linger now with me, thou Beauty,
On the sharp archaic shore.
Surely 'tis a wastrel's dut...
MERVYN PEAKE I shall live alone. Always alone. In a house or a tree.'

Fuchsia started to chew at a fre...
MERVYN PEAKE The moon slid inexorably into its zenith, the shadows shrivelling to the feet of all that cast them,...
MERVYN PEAKE The crumbling castle, looming among the mists, exhaled the season, and every cold stone breathed it ...
MERVYN PEAKE And there shall be a flame-green daybreak soon. And love itself will cry for insurrection! For tomor...
MERVYN PEAKE Mount and begone. The world awaits you.
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MERVYN PEAKE Swelter's eyes meet those of his enemy, and never has there held between four globes of gristle so s...
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MERVYN PEAKE For what use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook's nest with every twig a duty.
MERVYN PEAKE It was not certain what significance the ceremony held... but the formality was no less sacred for i...
MERVYN PEAKE In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous s...
MERVYN PEAKE When he at least reached the door the handle had cease to vibrate. Lowering himself suddenly to his ...
MERVYN PEAKE His was not the hatred that arises suddenly like a storm and as suddenly abates. It was, once the in...
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MERVYN PEAKE There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It...
MERVYN PEAKE Something to remember, that: cats for missiles.
MERVYN PEAKE For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless.
MERVYN PEAKE Oh how I hate people!
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MERVYN PEAKE I sometimes think about old tombs and weeds
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Wit...
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