Quotes by John Crowley

The door of the bar opened, showing him a momentary oblong of true daylight, blankly white. A woman entered. He couldnt see her face as she crossed to the bar in front of the window, but he could see, drawn with exactitude by the light behind her, her legs within a summery white dress. When young he had supposed, without giving it much thought, that women didnt realize that sun behind them revealed them in this way; now he supposes that of course they must, and thinks about it. (Novelty)

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.

Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novels worth of thought would have to be expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didnt work as finely or as patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long known, wasnt that it started up these large things but that it belittled the awful difficulties of their execution. (Novelty)

Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. Theme for a novel: The contrary pull ... No. If this notion were real, he neednt make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can. (Novelty)

Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

Violet said nothing, though big pearly tears, like a childs, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldnt understand them really, he would receive reverently, and out of him would come then the advice, the warnings, the clever decisions she could never have made.

Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the hills. Yet somewhere in the center still is the kiss. Thats what time is like.

Why, what is it, how can flesh and blood come up with such stuff, how can flesh feel it. My lord life is strange. How is that Meaning comes to be? How? How does life cast it up, shape it, exude it; how does Meaning come to have physical, tangible effects, to be felt with a shock, to cause grief or longing, come to be sought for like food; pure Meaning having nothing to do with the clothes of persons or events in which it is dressed and yet not ever divorceable from some set of such clothes?

Do you write every day? Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I dont work very hard, really. Really Im on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too. It comes to the same thing. Hed said all this before, to others; he wondered if hed said it to her. Its like weekend homework. Remember? There wasnt ever a time you absolutely had to do it - there was always Saturday, then Sunday - but then there wasnt ever a time when it wasnt there to do, too.How awful. (Novelty)

It must take a lot of self-discipline, she said.Oh, I dont know. I dont have much. He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that Dumas, I think it was Dumas, some terrifically prolific Frenchman, said that writing novels is a simple matter - if you write one page a day, youll write one novel a year, two pages a day, two novels a year, three pages, three novels, and so on. And how long does it take to cover a page with writing? Twenty minutes? An hour? So you see. Very easy really.I dont know, she said, laughing. I cant even bring myself to write a letter.Oh, now thats hard.(Novelty)

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 owls wings and talons and became other than conscious.

The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.

I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, couldnt itself be told.

Almost as soon as it was lit it began to sound as though it were running down, but in fact it would continue to run down for a long time. He knew the feeling.

“Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the hills. Yet somewhere in the center still is the kiss. Thats what time is like.”