91 Quotes by John Crowley

What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?” “Everybody always wonders that. I don’t think, really, anyone could feel the world grow older. Its life is far too long for that.” She took a black man of Alice’s. “What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world is old – very old. When you’re young, the world seems young. That’s all.

I learned, as the raft moved and I slid through the day, as the day slid through me, to let the task be master: which is only not to choose to do anything but what has chosen me to be done.

Sometimes the snake’s-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

Travel backward to a lost land heard of in childhood; find it to be incomprehensible, rich, strange; then discover it is the place from which you set out.

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

The angels saw him, who manage those skies he put his question to: they saw him, for this ring of earth is a place they often stop by, to gaze into it, as into a mirror, or through it, as through a keyhole. They smiled, hearing his question; and then one by one turned away, to look over their shoulders – for they were disturbed by a noise, a noise as of footfalls far away and faint, the footfalls of someone coming through behind.

This was what he had once upon a time expected and hoped of all books that he opened, that each be the one book he required, his own book. For.

So few of us, she thought, so much love and so few to spend it on, no wonder we get tangled up.

There aren’t many now who leave from the same world they were born into. Not here, not anywhere on earth as far as I can tell or know; the simplest and most unchanging of human societies have been shattered in the last hundred years, people flung into centrifuges of change and loss, that there comes to be nothing at last to say good-bye to. I was leaving the world, but it was not my world I was leaving.