John Crowley
Little, Big is a novel by American author John Crowley and one of his most notable works, following a narrative that has drawn consistent attention among readers of his fiction.
Crowley was born on December 1, 1942, in Presque Isle, and later studied at Indiana University. He has worked across several roles: novelist, screenwriter, and university teacher, and he writes in English. His fiction falls within the science fiction field, though his output as a whole spans more than one format and mode of writing.
Among his other notable works are Engine Summer, The Solitudes, and Love & Sleep. These titles, alongside Little, Big, make up the body of work for which Crowley is most frequently noted. His career has moved between novel-writing and screenwriting, and he has also held a position as a university teacher, keeping him connected to an academic environment alongside his work as a writer.
Crowley remains an active figure in American letters, identified as both a novelist and a science fiction writer. The range of his notable titles — from Engine Summer to Love & Sleep — reflects a career that has produced fiction across a sustained period of time, with his work in English reaching readers through multiple distinct books rather than a single defining output.
Quotes by John Crowley
They wanted eternal life; he gave them perpetual motion. It comes to the same thing, for such a race.
Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.
She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.
If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you’ll read. If you don’t, you’ll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway.
The Chinese, you know, believe that deep within each of us, no larger than the ball of your thumb, is the garden of the immortals, the great valley where we are all king forever.
She knew – she knew by now – that there really can be a person, one at least, that you can embrace as easily and wholly as though the two of you were one thing, a thing that once upon a time was broken into pieces and is now put back together. And how could she know this unless he knew it too? It was part of the wholeness, that he must; and that too she knew. With her he was for a moment whole, they were whole: as whole as an egg, and as fragile.
Aristotle says clearly, and St. Thomas follows him, that corporeal similitudes excite the memory more easily than the naked notions themselves.
His heart pounding with fear and elation, and his head humming with the fierce certainty of a sure thing, he kissed her. She responded as though for her too a certainty had proved out, and in the midst of her hair and lips and long arms encircling him, Smoky added a treasure of great price to the small store of his wisdom.
