Quotes from John Crowley

And he had promised, thinking of the Muslim letter-readers who must cover their ears when they read letters for their clients, so as not to overhear the contents.

George MacDonald, Andrew Jackson Davis, Swedenborg.

The story of the house all lit, the house of four floors, seven chimneys, three hundred and sixty-five stairs, fifty-two doors, traveled far; they were all travelers then. It

I think we are Somehow dealing not with a man but with a geography.

infundibular.

She slipped from her tall chair (why don't we remember living in a world where everything was absurdly outsize, tables and chairs and spoons, door knobs too high to reach, too fat to grasp?) and went to look.

He'll never understand or see, they'll never give him what they gave us, he'll step in the wrong places and look when he should look away, never see doors or know turnings; wait and see, you just wait and see";

infundibulum

It's the sensation that all intentionality and will is being drained from the world, all consciousness, that there is nothing in earthly activity but malign blind indifference; that even the willed behavior of persons, speaking, thinking, doing, is only mechanical ticks and tocks. Finally that they cannot even be heard or seen, because all eyes are blind, all ears are stopped. My own consciousness the only one existent to know this.

a phrase of hers fell in with one of his and one of his with one of hers and, as elated as if they were the first to discover the trick of it, they conversed.

His secret-agentry was over, but he had by this time gone so long in disguise indetectably as a member of his family that by slow stages he had actually become one.

There was an old woman Who lived under the hill And if she's not gone She lives there still.

Fox Cap—now herself complete—sat herself down among them. Her cap was on her head, for (just as he had thought she would) she'd got it back from them. Those around her petted her and with their fingers they fed her this and that, a tiny wan thing amid their overbearing fatness.

The Crows of the region could have told them that there are almost always more Crows around them than they can see; but like the few snowflakes that fall on your tongue or autumn leaves you can catch, it's only the ones you can count that matter.

What if it were true. It could not be: but what if it were. Strange but true. A sudden partisanship arose within Pierce's heart, a longing so deep and simple that he could not even be puzzled by it: a longing indistinguishable from grief, that the story ought to be true, and could not be.

Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump. He liked them big; he liked them old; he liked them best in many volumes

Her eyes were deep and feral, and she had a single eyebrow—that is, it extended without a break across her nose, unplucked and thick.

So much not to ask. It was a great art, that one. He had learned to deploy it as skillfully as a surgeon his art, or a poet his. To listen; to nod; to act on what he was told as though he understood it; not to offer criticism or advice, except of the mildest kind, just to show his interest and concern; to puzzle out. To stroke Sophie's hair, and try not to deflect her sadness; to wonder how she had gone on with such a life, with such a sorrow at its heart, and never ask.

En ciel un dieu, en terre une déesse

It's as though," Daily Alice said, "each day is like a step, and every step takes you further away from—well, from when things made more sense. When things were all alive, and made signs to you. And you can no more not take a step farther away than you could not live through a day." "I

What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?

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.

I used to think, in Belaire, that maybe you had gone to live with the List, and it hadn't suited you, and that one spring they'd bring you home dead. From homesickness. I saw how you would look, pale and sad." "I did die," she said. "It was easy.

And lastly, the vastest circle, the infinity, the center point—Faëry, ladies and gentlemen, where the heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea beyond sea and there is no end to possibility—