John Crowley Quotes

"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.

Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

Nothing was stranger to Crows than this: how People thought that only by their own actions would the seasons be made to turn, the days grow warm after winter and the green things grow up that they planted. They thought the sun was a person like them, and did what it pleased; on the longest of winter nights, they must fire a great pile of dry brush on a hilltop to cause the sun to wake and rise rather than remaining below the daywise edge of the world. The Crows knew the world had no edge, because they flew, and could see the steady arising of it up from the far-off, tree by hill, and then beneath them and away — but the People didn’t know it and wouldn’t have believed the Crows if the Crows had told them. But People knew the day on which the season of the long sun changed into the season of the short sun; they knew when the moon would brighten and when it would darken, and for how long: and about those things they were never wrong.

The vastest point, the center, the infinity — Faëry, where the gigantic heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea upon sea and there is no end to possibility — that circle is so tiny it has no doors at all.

"Snow not falling but flying sidewise, and sudden, not signaled by the slow curdling of clouds all day and a flake or two drifting downward, but rushing forward all at once as though sent for. (The blizzard of '36 had looked like that.) And filling up the world's concavities, pillowing up in the gloaming, making night light with its whiteness, and then falling still in every one's dreams, falling for pages and pages... ("Novelty")"

"One page a day, seven a week, thirty or thirty-one to the month. Fishing in his pocket for a tip, he came up with his pen, a thick black fountain pen. Fountain: it seemed less flowing, less forthcoming than that, in shape more like a bullet or a bomb. ("Novelty")"

He knew there must be a Ring, and he patted his pocket where he had it; he thought there should be a Best Man, though when he wrote so to Daily Alice she wrote that they didn't believe in that; and as for Rehearsals, she said when he mentioned them, "Don't you want it to be a surprise?"

A foreign nation to which the witch and the sorcerer gave their whole allegiance, where every common human act and feeling was reversed and made into its opposite: where the Savior of mankind was despised and His Cross trampled and shat upon, and the Devil’s fundament worshipped; where persons surrendered their natural dominion over the animals and instead took on animal form themselves; where coupling was done openly in groups and not in the dark alone; where children were not nurtured but aborted and slain, not fed but eaten. Children killed and eaten: not in fable, not to be released unharmed from the wolf’s belly or resurrected from their own boiled bones, but truly killed and eaten like fowl by our neighbors in secret. The ultimate crime, the crime the Roman magistrates once charged the first Christians with, and the Christians their Gnostic rivals and later the Jews who lived among them. When we hear of children killed and eaten we have entered the counterworld, Hell on earth, and it is usual for some, or many, to be hunted down and slain before it is closed and forgotten again.

George MacDonald, Andrew Jackson Davis, Swedenborg.

Dar Oakley said nothing. Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.

A streak of presence surrounded by a dim glow of absence.

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.

The things that make us happy make us wise.

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.

The world is founded on a pillar which is founded on the Deep.