Quotes from John Crowley

Suppose a branch of our old family tree—a branch that seemed doomed to wither—had in fact not died out but survived, survived by learning arts just as new to the world but utterly different from the tool-making and fire-building of its grosser cousins, us. Suppose that instead they had learned concealment, smallification, disappearance, and some way to blind the eyes of beholders.

Mais en réalité, c'est seulement aujourd'hui qu'il le comprend, au moment où il en parle, à savoir que, dans un pays où tout n'est que symbole, on n'a besoin que d'un exemplaire de chaque : un château, un roi, un amoureux, un rival, un enfant, un animal, un poisson, un oiseau, une dent, un Å"il, une coupe, un lit. Tous ne sont que ce qu'ils représentent, et c'est ce qu'ils représentent qui change.

She marched up to it anyway, reaching it with surprising suddenness, the corridor was shorter than it seemed, or seemed longer than it was, whichever; and the door at its end was even smaller than the one she'd come in by. If this keeps up, she thought, I'll be crawling next…. On the door, in fresh white paint in an antique style, the number 001 was painted. Laughing

But now the mystic night has passed; the cock has crowed, the goat's abroad. Black things of night, the bat, the bug, have flown away; the flowers have opened their cups to catch the sun.

Are you sure," she said, looking within, "that this is where I'm spose to be?" "Oh, it certainly is." "Boy. It's real little in here." "Oh, yes it is. Won't you please step right on in.

There were the eyebrows, for one thing. He was convinced that the single eyebrow which some, but not all of them, had inherited from Violet had something to do with it. August

Violet always said that in her part of England a single eyebrow marked you as a violent, criminal person, possibly a maniac.

Already he found himself forgetting that something like an occluded front seemed to have swept over his memories of Sylvie, which he had thought as hard and changeless as anything he owned, but which when he touched them now seemed to have turned to autumn leaves like fairy gold, turned to wet earth, staghorn, snails' shells, fauns' feet.

The things that make us happy," he said, "make us wise.

I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover.

Men tend to try to struggle to be more rational and reduce things to simplicity more and are more impatient with ambiguity than women are.

But I'm very happy to work within tight parameters, and when you know you have an actor for two days, and you have to get that work done in two days, that focuses the mind wonderfully.

Realistic novels simply pretend that the rules of their invented worlds are identical to the rules of actual life, but that's a ruse.

The further in you go, the bigger it gets.

I've always had a compassion for characters in novels - the sense that they are, whatever they might think, living in a world that has a shape they don't know and can't finally alter.

The things that make us happy make us wise.

Love is a myth.' 'Love is a myth,' Grandfather Trout said. 'Like summer.' 'What?' 'In winter,'Grandfather Trout said, 'summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious.

The further in you go, the bigger it gets.

God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.

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.

The universe is Time's body.

Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.