Quotes from John Crowley

O great wide beautiful wonderful World With the wonderful waters around you curled And the beautiful grass upon your breast O World you are beautifully dressed.

Sin pressed on her. He held her like forgiveness. "Poor child," he said. "Lost. But no more.

tacenda Now what? She advanced the paper, and wrote: they mean no good to us She thought about this for a moment, and then directly under it, she added: they mean us no harm either.

What it is," Violet said when John, hands behind his back, came up to her, "is many houses, isn't it?" "Many houses," he said, smiling. "Every one for you.

He went out, already unaccountably weary though the journey had not even begun, into the multicolored arctic waste beneath a decillion stars, whose near brilliance seemed to chime, even as the harness of his reindeer chimed when they raised their shaggy heads at his approach, and as the eternal snow chimed too when he trod it with his booted feet. Room

It's a great joke!" she said. "Many jokes! Are there as many houses inside?" "In a sense," he said. "Oh, show me!

A similarity between fishing and this other enterprise was that no matter where along the stream you stood, there seemed to be, just down there, where the stream spilled through a narrow race around stones, or just beyond the tresses of the willows, the perfect spot, the spot you had all along intended to go to.

Now you address me," the kingfisher said. " 'O Bird!' you say, and make your request." "O Bird!" August said, opening his hands imploringly, "Tell me this: Is it okay if we have a gas station in Meadowbrook, and sell Ford cars?" "Certainly." "What?" "Certainly!

the snake's-hands in a story can be the best part.

the slow, the vast fall of the Cosmos backward through the Zodiac, the so-called precession of the equinoxes—that unimaginably stately grand tour which would take some twenty thousand years longer, until once again the spring equinox coincided with the first degrees of Aries: where conventional astrology for convenience's sake assumes it always to be, and where Hawksquill had found it fixed in her Cosmo-Opticon when she had first acquired the thing.

Yet for all he knew the terrible griefs, great sufferings, accidents and windfalls it told of were all true to life—what did he know about life, about people? Maybe most people were as wilful, as overmastered by ambition, blood, lust, money, passion as the TV showed them.

girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was to go through.

Ahead the sedgy, flower-starred meadow rose up to a knoll, and there grew an oak tree and a thorn together, in deep embrace, inseparable. She

He had thought the story was *theirs*, People's, that he was in it by chance, somehow impelled into it by reasons not his, that it was a thing torn out of Ymr that shouldn't be in Ka at all. But Kits was right, it was he who'd been in it, not People, however much they wanted to be and he had not. It was his story, and the stories about the story were his too. He was girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was through.

High on the hilltop The old King sits; He is now so old and gray He's nigh lost his wits. —Allingham, The Fairies

The Tale was behind them. And it was to there they journeyed. One step would take them there; they were there already

He took his furred hat from its peg and drew on his gloves.

Houses made of houses within houses made of time.

It seemed, in those days, that the more the angels had to ride on, and talk over distances with, and get together by, the more separate they became. The more they made the world smaller, the greater the distances between them.

She would have to grow large enough to contain the whole world, or the whole great world turn out to be small enough after all to fit within the compass of her bosom.

Inside it seemed much larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn't tell which.

Like someone coming to consciousness with the cessation of pain, she gathered around herself the world, the dawn, and her future.

I was proud of this small insight; I had no notion how close I was to the truth, and therefore I was as far away as ever.

But will she come in time? Oh yes just in time; whenever she comes is just in time; when we have despaired for the thousandth midnight of any such a one ever coming from anywhere, she will arrive, in a tearing hurry, breaking into or out of the last spheres of air, fire, water, earth as though throwing open the successive doors of a long corridor, down which she rushes, her hair streaming and her brow knit, her hand already beside her mouth to call into the ear of our souls Wake up.