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Quote by Mervyn Peake

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The Craft of the Lead Pencil

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Author

Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake was a British writer renowned for his imaginative and distinctive works. He is most celebrated for his Gormenghast series, a blend of fantasy, satire, and horror that has become a cornerstone of modern fantasy literature. Peake's writing is characterized by its vivid descriptions and complex characters. more

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“A good thing to do is to think about what people have done. Not only people that you've read about in books or seen on the news or heard mentioned in deliberate conversation, and not only deeds that are noteworthy. It's good to think about all the possibilities of what people have probably done. The scope of what's possible, statistical probabilities of unique behavior and unusual action in the 200,000 years that people have existed because there are more than 7 billion of us alive right now and that's not including the number of people who have ever lived. Within those numbers exist captivating, eccentric, strange, fanciful variation, when you consider what people have probably done. Like, every time you've had an impulse that you've held back, imagine that there has been a person who has had that same impulse and gone through with it, because there probably has been. Imagine any type of person and any type of story having happened because when you do that, it feels like you're creating, but you're probably not. Imagine, considering the magnitude of these numbers and the variables within each human being, that all possibilities have occurred. If physical anomalies like twins born with bodies totally fused together resembling two-headed, eight limbed, human spiders, or a man born with a shrunken female head affixed to the back of his own head, which was animated without being consciously controlled by him, then imagine that anything you can imagine has occurred. However typical or atypical, these things you're imagining have happened. These people you're thinking of have been.”

PhilosophyStoriesHumanityImaginationMultiverseProbabilitiesInfinities
Book:Handsome Vanilla
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“There may very well have been a tennis player named Dennis whose only reason for playing tennis was for the thrill of the rhyme. There may have even been two Tennis Dennises. In fact, with billions and billions of people, 200,000 years, give or take the years before tennis was a sport, there may have even been three. You might find that thinking this way expands your freedom, your consideration of your own capability, the spectrum of what all people can be, and can do.”

PhilosophyHumanityImaginationExistenceTennisMultiverseProbabilities
Book:Handsome Vanilla
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“Everything reminded him of something else: the fragrance of a peach-skin was like opening his stamp-album, the chack-chack of the wheatear not only recalled mist on the hills, but also reminded him of foxgloves, droplets of rain tapping from the mauve bells on to a dock leaf or fern. Ferns reminded him of his mother's soap, the luxurious tan-coloured lozenges that came to her in a box each christmas and birthday, and other scents too, the yellow of oriental jasmine, the pink of tea-rose, the green of mimosa. For all of these scents he could find a correlative within the spectrum of his own experience.”

ImaginationSymbolismSurrealismFree Association
Book:Blue Rock
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