“Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to retie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened herself she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room.”

“But Fuchsia might as well have been carved from dark marble. Only her tears moved.”

“I hate things! I hate all things! I hate and hate every single tiniest thing. I hate the world.” said Fuchsia aloud, raising herself on her elbows, her face to the sky.“I shall live alone. Always alone. In a house, or in a tree.”Fuchsia started to chew at a fresh grass blade.“Someone will come then, if I live alone. Someone from another kind of world - a new world - not from this world, but someone who is different, and he will fall in love with me at once because I live alone and aren’t like the other beastly things in this world, and he’ll enjoy having me because of my pride.”

“From daybreak to sunset she turned her thoughts, like boulders, over. She set them in long lines. She rearranged their order...”

“Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping arch, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.”

“The sun sank with a sob and darkness waded in from all horizons so that the sky contracted and there was no more light left in the world, when, at this very moment of annihilation, the moon, as though she had been waiting for her cue, sailed up the night.”

“With what characters she had filled this lost stage of emptiness! It was here that she would see the people of her imagination, the fierce figures of her making, as they strolled from corner to corner, brooded like monsters or flew through the air like seraphs with burning wings, or danced, or fought, or laughed, or cried. This was her attic of make-believe, where she would watch her mind's companions advancing or retreating across the dusty floor.”