Limited Time Offer
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.
When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him… - John Crowley
" "When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.
The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them.
In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void.
Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word,
English
Collect this quote
About John Crowley
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.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by John Crowley
In a moment of silence they simply looked at each other, and understanding hummed, thundered within Smoky as he realized what had happened; not only had he fallen in love with her, and at first sight, but she at first sight had fallen in love with him, and the two circumstances had this effect: his anonymity was being cured. Not disguised, as George Mouse had tried to do, but cured, from the inside out. That was the feeling. It was as though she stirred him with cornstarch. He had begun to thicken.
Why Smoky liked about his girls' growing up was that, though they moved away from him, they did so (it seemed to him) less from any distaste or boredom than simply to accommodate a growth in their own lives: when they were kids, their lives and concerns - Tacey's rabbits and music, Lily's bird's nests and boy-friends, Lucy's bewilderments - could all fit within the compass of his life, which was then replete; and then as they grew up and out, they no longer fit, they needed room, their concerns multiplied, lovers and then children had to be fitted in, he could no longer contain them unless he expanded too, and so he did, and so his own life got larger as theirs did, and he felt them to be no further from him than ever, and he liked that. What he didn't like about their growing up was the same thing: that it forced him to grow, to enlarge, sometimes beyond what he felt the character he had come over the years to be encased in could stand.
Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI
Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.
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.
Loading...