American writer of speculative fiction (born 1942)
John Crowley (born 1 December 1942) is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and mainstream fiction, most famous as the author of Little, Big (1981), which received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.
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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,
"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.
"There was a trembling tightness around his diaphragm, as though something struggled for release or escape there. He knew the phrase "butterflies in your stomach," but is one of those people to whom phrases like that communicate nothing. He has had butterflies in his stomach as he'd had the willies, and the jitters; more than once he has been beside himself; but has always thought these experiences were his alone, and never knew they were so common as to have names. His ignorance allowed him to compose poetry about the weird feelings he felt, a handful of typewritten pages which as soon as he was dressed in the neat black suit he put carefully into the green canvas knapsack. . ."
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. That's what time is like.
When he received these communications, Santa drew the claws of his spectacles from behind his ears and pressed the sore place on the bridge of his nose with thumb and finger. What was it they expected him to do with these? A shotgun, a bear, snowshoes, some pretty things and some useful: well, all right. But for the rest of it … He just didn’t know what people were thinking anymore. But it was growing late; if they, or anyone else, were disappointed in him tomorrow, it wouldn’t be the first time.
One by one the lights burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer, but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if ever there was a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing; that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous and shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.
Nosotros decimos que para consolarnos por la pérdida del Paraíso Dios nos concedió sólo a nosotros entre todas sus criaturas Esperanza y Memoria. Mejor dijéramos: Sólo porque somos criaturas cargadas con Esperanza y Memoria alentamos la ilusión de un Paraíso que nosotros y solamente nosotros hemos perdido.
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Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and lay naked in the long bars of sun for a time, touching herself awake, finding eyes, knees, breasts, red-gold hair all in place and where she had left them. Then she stood, stretched, brushed the last of sleep from her face, and knelt by the bed amid the squares of sun and said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers:
He learned, though slowly, what all great harrowed lovers learn: that love is what most surely compels love — is perhaps, except for brute force, the only thing that does, though only (and this was the terrible gift he had been given) when the lover truly believes, as August could, that when his love is strong enough it must surely be returned — and August's was.
The tears of those who never cry, the calm, the levelheaded ones, are terrible to see. She seemed to be split or torn by the force of the tears, which she squeezed her eyes shut against, which she forced back with her fist against her lips. Smokey, afraid and awed, came immediately to her as he might to rescue his child from a fire, without thought and without knowing quite what he would do. When he tried to take her hand, speak softly to her, she only trembled more violently, the red cross branded on her face grew uglier; so he enveloped her, smothered the flames, Disregarding her resistance, as well as he could he covered her, having a vague idea that he could by tenderness invade her and then rout her grief, whatever it was, by main strength. He wasn't sure he wasn't himself the cause of it, wasn't sure if she would cling to him for comfort or break him in rage, but he had no choice anyway, savior or sacrifice, it didn't matter so long as she could cease suffering.