Quotes from John Crowley

A secret is not a thing you're not supposed to tell; it is a thing that can't be told.

So few of us, she thought, so much love and so few to spend it on, no wonder we get tangled up.

she could do things when her body was busy that she could at no other time, things like assemble her worries into ranks, each rank commanded by a hope.

Letting the task be master is a hard task for men, hardest of all for the angel's children, however distantly descended. But it could be learned: learned is the only way it could be learned, for I am a man. Far away and long ago the angels struggled in great anguish with the world, struggled unceasingly; but I would learn, yes, in the long engine summer of the world I would learn to live with it, I would.

Sometimes the snake's-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

When she [Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia] went to take the waters at Spa, he [René Descartes] wrote to her that to get any benefit from them she should free her mind from all sorts of sad thoughts and even from serious reflections, because those who look long on the green of the forest, the colors of a flower, the flight of a bird, can beguile themselves into not thinking, or thinking of nothing. 'Which is not wasting time but using it well.

Men are men, but Man is a woman. —Chesterton

When you return home, you'll tell the story of how you sought it and failed, and that story will be told and told again. And when you're dead yourself, the story will go on being told, and in that telling you'll speak and act and be alive again.

What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?" "Everybody always wonders that. I don't think, really, anyone could feel the world grow older. Its life is far too long for that." She took a black man of Alice's. "What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world is old—very old. When you're young, the world seems young. That's all.

Qui non intellegit, aut taceat aut discat: if you don't get it, shut up or go figure.

Dar Oakley said nothing. Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.

One of the virtues of drink was how it reduced life to these simple matters, which engaged all the attention; seeing, walking, raising a bottle accurately to the hole in your face. As though you were two years old again. No thoughts but simple ones. And

In the twilight of the world that we inhabit there will come to some on soft, silent wings a strange understanding: that things have not always been the way they are, and that therefore they need not always be as they have been. And Hegel says that this understanding is itself the sign that indeed the night is coming, that maybe the morning will be ours to see." Hegel

For it is in the passage-times that fall between ages—when the laws of an old world weaken and begin to fail and the laws of the new are not yet in force—that we are visited with the notion that time is malleable, that the future is up for shaping, that nothing is fixed: then we are brushed by that wing, and it is the only call we will get.

He wavered suddenly, doubted doubts. He looked at his big beloved.

It struck Rosie that nowadays everyone lived the way gay men like Kraft had always lived; in brief collisions, restless, among lovers whom there was no way to fix except for as long as you could hold their hands. And then what? And then remember them, and keep in touch: friends.

GOOD WILL YOU MARK BELOW ALL ALL RIGHT WITH LOVE AFTERWARDS WHY NOT SAY YES [ ] YES

There are things in your past, preserved in memory almost by chance, that only later on, because of the course your own life takes, come to seem proleptic, or significant, or fascinating, when other things don't.

This was what he had once upon a time expected and hoped of all books that he opened, that each be the one book he required, his own book. For

I know that things can't stay the same, that change is the whole of the law: but that not just the human world but the earth and the weather and life itself could be different at the end of a single lifetime from how it was at the beginning . . . you feel that the world, the earth, can die along with you. Can it? How can I believe that all around me is ruination unless I believe it was once as it should be, and I was alive then to see it? And how am I to know that this is so?

He had the funny feeling that doors long bolted within him were being forced, that in the general amnesty of carnival something jailed in him since puberty was being let out— somewhat by mistake— into the open air, to be welcomed by the cheering mob.

Circumference = nowhere; center point =

Carrying a torch," George Mouse called it, and Auberon, who had never heard the old phrase, thought it just, because he thought of the torch he carried not as a penitential or devotional one, but as Sylvie. He carried a torch: her. She flared brightly sometimes, sank low other times; he saw by her, though he had no path in particular he wanted to see.

First she wanted to taste the sweat that shone on his throat and fragile clavicle; then he chose to undo the tails of her shirt, that she had tied up beneath her breasts; then, but then impatient they forgot about taking turns and quarreled silently, eagerly over each other, like pirates dividing treasure long sought, long imagined, long withheld. In