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… - John Crowley

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.

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.

Paradise. A world elsewhere.
He didn't really mind that there was a long Tale being told, didn't even object any longer that he had been put to its uses; he only wanted it to continue, not to stop, to go on being muttered out endlessly by whatever powers they were who spun it, putting him to sleep with its half-heard anecdotes and going on still while he slept in his grave. He didn't want it to snatch him up in this way, startle him with high, sad, harrowing conclusions he wasn't equal to. He didn't want it to have taken his wife from him.
He didn't want to be marched off to another world he couldn't imagine; a little world that couldn't be as big as this one.
Yes it is, said the breezes that passed his ears.
It couldn't contain all seasons in their fullness, all happinesses, all griefs. It couldn't contain the history of his five senses and all that they had known.
But it does, said the breezes.
Not all of that, which was his world; and then more too.
Oh more, said the Breezes; more, much more.