Category: John Crowley

John Crowley

It must take a lot of self-discipline,’ she said.’Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have much.’ He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that ‘Dumas, I think it was Dumas, some terrifically prolific Frenchman, said that writing novels is a simple matter – if you write one page a day, you’ll write one novel a year, two pages a day, two novels a year, three pages, three novels, and so on. And how long does it take to cover a page with writing? Twenty minutes? An hour? So you see. Very easy really.”I don’t know,’ she said, laughing. ‘I can’t even bring myself to write a letter.”Oh, now that’s hard.'(“Novelty”)

John Crowley

Do you write every day?’ ‘Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don’t work very hard, really. Really I’m on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too. It comes to the same thing.’ He’d said all this before, to others; he wondered if he’d said it to her. ‘It’s like weekend homework. Remember? There wasn’t ever a time you absolutely had to do it – there was always Saturday, then Sunday – but then there wasn’t ever a time when it wasn’t there to do, too.”How awful.’ (“Novelty”)

John Crowley

Why, what is it, how can flesh and blood come up with such stuff, how can flesh feel it. My lord life is strange. How is that Meaning comes to be? How? How does life cast it up, shape it, exude it; how does Meaning come to have physical, tangible effects, to be felt with a shock, to cause grief or longing, come to be sought for like food; pure Meaning having nothing to do with the clothes of persons or events in which it is dressed and yet not ever divorceable from some set of such clothes?

John Crowley

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.

John Crowley

The door of the bar opened, showing him a momentary oblong of true daylight, blankly white. A woman entered. He couldn’t see her face as she crossed to the bar in front of the window, but he could see, drawn with exactitude by the light behind her, her legs within a summery white dress. When young he had supposed, without giving it much thought, that women didn’t realize that sun behind them revealed them in this way; now he supposes that of course they must, and thinks about it. (“Novelty”)