Quotes from John Crowley

Nosotros decimos que para consolarnos por la pérdida del Paraíso Dios nos concedió sólo a nosotros entre todas sus criaturas Esperanza y Memoria. Mejor dijéramos: Sólo porque somos criaturas cargadas con Esperanza y Memoria alentamos la ilusión de un Paraíso que nosotros y solamente nosotros hemos perdido.

She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head.

Divorced?' 'Separated.' He tested his thumb against the pricks of the rose. 'Women. They say you got all the freedom. Then you give them their freedom, and they don't want it.' ("Novelty")

The Chinese, you know, believe that deep within each of us, no larger than the ball of your thumb, is the garden of the immortals, the great valley where we are all king forever.

What you learn as you get older is that the world is old, and has been old for a long time.

Almost as soon as it was lit it began to sound as though it were running down, but in fact it would continue to run down for a long time. He knew the feeling.

Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

The angels saw him, who manage those skies he put his question to: they saw him, for this ring of earth is a place they often stop by, to gaze into it, as into a mirror, or through it, as through a keyhole. They smiled, hearing his question; and then one by one turned away, to look over their shoulders – for they were disturbed by a noise, a noise as of footfalls far away and faint, the footfalls of someone coming through behind.

His heart pounding with fear and elation, and his head humming with the fierce certainty of a sure thing, he kissed her. She responded as though for her too a certainty had proved out, and in the midst of her hair and lips and long arms encircling him, Smoky added a treasure of great price to the small store of his wisdom.

Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning, whenever that is or was. Stories are what the history not made of time is made of. Funny

Why, what is it, how can flesh and blood come up with such stuff, how can flesh feel it. My lord life is strange. How is that Meaning comes to be? How? How does life cast it up, shape it, exude it; how does Meaning come to have physical, tangible effects, to be felt with a shock, to cause grief or longing, come to be sought for like food; pure Meaning having nothing to do with the clothes of persons or events in which it is dressed and yet not ever divorceable from some set of such clothes?

One page a day, seven a week, thirty or thirty-one to the month. Fishing in his pocket for a tip, he came up with his pen, a thick black fountain pen. Fountain: it seemed less flowing, less forthcoming than that, in shape more like a bullet or a bomb. ("Novelty")

There aren't many now who leave from the same world they were born into. Not here, not anywhere on earth as far as I can tell or know; the simplest and most unchanging of human societies have been shattered in the last hundred years, people flung into centrifuges of change and loss, that there comes to be nothing at last to say good-bye to. I was leaving the world, but it was not my world I was leaving

He looked up into Daily Alice's placid and certain face, wondering why every deepening of these daily mysteries left him less inclined to probe them. "The things that make us happy," he said, "make us wise.

There's a time in some years, after the first frosts, when the sun gets hot again, and summer returns for a time. Winter is coming; you know that from the way the mornings smell, the way the leaves, half-turned to color, are dry and poised to drop. But summer goes on, a small false summer, all the more precious for being small and false. In Little Belaire, we called this time--for some reason nobody knows--engine summer.

Aristotle says clearly, and St. Thomas follows him, that corporeal similitudes excite the memory more easily than the naked notions themselves.

Circumference = nowhere; center point = everywhere.

She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.

There is more than one history of the world.

She began to laugh. You will wander, and live in many houses. "Many houses!

they liked to fancy themselves bubbles of earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying 'We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!' —Flora Thompson, Lark Rise

A streak of presence surrounded by a dim glow of absence.

They wanted eternal life; he gave them perpetual motion. It comes to the same thing, for such a race.

With Graham Greene life is a precious, perpetual, snot-sodden whinge.