John Crowley Quotes

#1. Men tend to try to struggle to be more rational and reduce things to simplicity more and are more impatient with ambiguity than women are.

John Crowley

#2. And yet, though we wake, though there is no end to waking and saying Oh I see, not ever [ ... ], still within the dream in which we find ourselves every other dream is nested, every one we have awakened from.

John Crowley

#3. What you learn as you get older is that the world is old, and has been old for a long time.

John Crowley

#4. With Graham Greene life is a precious, perpetual, snot-sodden whinge.

John Crowley

#5. Almost as soon as it was lit it began to sound as though it were running down, but in fact it would continue to run down for a long time. He knew the feeling.

John Crowley

#6. He wavered suddenly, doubted doubts. He looked at his big beloved.

John Crowley

#7. Love is a myth.'
'Love is a myth,' Grandfather Trout said. 'Like summer.'
'What?'
'In winter,'Grandfather Trout said, 'summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.

John Crowley

#8. I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, couldn't itself be told.

John Crowley

#9. Fundamentally, whether directing in the theatre or a film, you have to be a good storyteller, regardless of the form. The thing I had to work hardest at was thinking in shots.

John Crowley

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

John Crowley

#11. In silvergreen rainy April they went down to Glastonbury on the long straight roads ...

John Crowley

#12. It occurred to him that seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story.

John Crowley

#13. 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.

John Crowley

#14. Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.

John Crowley

#15. He had the distracted chuckle of troubled old people who look within, keeping watch on failing organs.

John Crowley

#16. Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

John Crowley

#17. Men are men, but Man is a woman. - Chesterton

John Crowley

#18. I've always had a compassion for characters in novels - the sense that they are, whatever they might think, living in a world that has a shape they don't know and can't finally alter.

John Crowley

#19. After many trials the God and his love end happily - tho' not all remember this conclusion - which is less memorable than the moment when everything was lost. Happy endings are all alike; disasters may be unique.

John Crowley

#20. GOOD WILL
YOU MARK BELOW
ALL ALL RIGHT WITH LOVE AFTERWARDS
WHY NOT SAY YES
[ ] YES

John Crowley

#21. But I'm very happy to work within tight parameters, and when you know you have an actor for two days, and you have to get that work done in two days, that focuses the mind wonderfully.

John Crowley

#22. One page a day, seven a week, thirty or thirty-one to the month. Fishing in his pocket for a tip, he came up with his pen, a thick black fountain pen. Fountain: it seemed less flowing, less forthcoming than that, in shape more like a bullet or a bomb. ("Novelty")

John Crowley

#23. Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning, whenever that is or was. Stories are what the history not made of time is made of. Funny,

John Crowley

#24. She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head.

John Crowley

#25. The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.

John Crowley

#26. Only think a moment that we are here now, and that that was then, and it has come to this, and how odd, odd, odd it is!

John Crowley

#27. God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.

John Crowley

#28. Handsome guy, Victor, in a brutal, black-Irish way. Like most New York bartenders, he was really an actor, or was it the reverse? ("Novelty")

John Crowley

#29. They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother.

John Crowley

#30. The further in you go, the bigger it gets.

John Crowley

#31. The universe is Time's body.

John Crowley

#32. Once arrived in the City, he dispersed utterly and gratefully in it like a raindrop fallen into the sea.

John Crowley

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

John Crowley

#34. 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.

John Crowley

#35. Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

John Crowley

#36. With Occam's old razor she could slit the throat of that idea.

John Crowley

#37. But is this not what poetry must do? To say the nothing that cannot be said?

John Crowley

#38. She could do things when her body was busy that she could at no other time, things like assemble her worries into ranks, each rank commanded by a hope.

John Crowley

#39. 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.

John Crowley

#40. Realistic novels simply pretend that the rules of their invented worlds are identical to the rules of actual life, but that's a ruse.

John Crowley

#41. I had very clever producers, who scheduled it brilliantly, but scheduling it was a nightmare.

John Crowley

#42. The things that make us happy make us wise.

John Crowley

#43. Divorced?'
'Separated.'
He tested his thumb against the pricks of the rose. 'Women. They say you got all the freedom. Then you give them their freedom, and they don't want it.' ("Novelty")

John Crowley

#44. Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repetition: the universe is Time's body.

John Crowley

#45. Everybody grows up by leaps, and not by a steady climb like a mountaineer.

John Crowley

#46. Christmas succeeds Christmas rather than the days it follows.

John Crowley

#47. 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.

John Crowley

#48. He looked up into Daily Alice's placid and certain face, wondering why every deepening of these daily mysteries left him less inclined to probe them. "The things that make us happy," he said, "make us wise.

John Crowley

#49. The bottom line is, it's a great script and that's very inspiring and makes you want to overcome whatever technical difficulties you come up against.

John Crowley

#50. Their laughter rose to the ceiling and shook hands there.

John Crowley

#51. But life is wakings-up, all unexpected, all surprising.

John Crowley

#52. There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.

John Crowley

#53. Path is only a name for a place where you find yourself. Where you're going on it is only a story. Where you've been on it is only another. Some of the stories are pleasant ones; some are not. That's dark and light.

John Crowley

#54. 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.

John Crowley