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.

— John Crowley
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John Crowley Quotes

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.

— John Crowley

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

— John Crowley

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.

— John Crowley

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

— John Crowley

There is more than one history of the world.

— John Crowley

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

— John Crowley

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

— John Crowley

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

— John Crowley

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.

— John Crowley

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.

— John Crowley

Feeling intensely the shopkeeper’s impatience at his free use of a place of business for profitless shelter, Auberon had begun staring at the various bottles, and at last bought the rum because the girl on its label, in a peasant blouse, arms full of green cane-stalks, reminded him of Sylvie; or rather seemed to him what Sylvie would look like if she were imaginary.

— John Crowley

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.

— John Crowley

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.

— John Crowley

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

— John Crowley

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.

— John Crowley

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.

— John Crowley

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

— John Crowley

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.

— John Crowley

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.

— John Crowley

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.

— John Crowley
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