John Crowley: Quotes about time

John Crowley is American writer. Explore interesting quotes on time.

John Crowley: 54 quotes0 likes

“Lately Marge's memory had grown weak, which is to say that it no longer contained the past time on deposit there, it was not strong enough to keep shut up the moments, the mornings and evenings, of her long life, its seals broke, and her memories ran together mingling, indistinguishable from the present. Her memory had grown incontinent with age.”

Bk. 6, Ch. 3
Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament (1981)

“"Listen," she said. "I get off in an hour. Sit in the back. I'll see you then."
As though they'd agreed to this a long time ago. That was the sign, he was as yet unused to noticing it but he was learning: that sensation that the future has already happened and is only bringing itself about in staging these present moments.”

John Crowley book Four Freedoms

Part Two, Chapter 7
Four Freedoms (2009)

“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. And how will we perceive this body? And how operate on it? Not by the means we perceive extension, relation, color, form — the qualities of Space. … No: but by the means we perceive duration and repetition and change: by Memory.”

Bk. 4, Ch. 3
Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament (1981)

“We weren't where we were in those times because we had been thrown or moved there. We didn't think so. We felt we had impelled ourselves, like the faring pioneers and immigrants driving their wagons or pushing their barrows who somewhere somehow along the way stopped and settled. […] True, in some places we stayed on where our fathers and mothers and grandfathers had first settled, but even so we were caught up in that motion if our parents and grandparents had happened to settle in places that those on the move were now headed for or drawn to—seemingly blown to, you might think seeing them, as by those cosmic tornadoes that lift a boy on a bicycle or a chicken coop full of chickens or a ford car with Gramps and Gram inside and set it down unharmed somewhere else.”

John Crowley book Four Freedoms

Part One, Chapter 5
Four Freedoms (2009)

“There wasn't any answer to that. So he tried harder, and the question got more circumstantial and tentative, and at the same time more precise and exact; and still there were no answers, only the fuller and fuller form of the question, evolving as Auberon had described to her all life evolving, reaching out limbs and inventing organs, reticulating joints, doing and being in more and more complex yet more and more compact and individuated ways, until the question, perfectly asked, understood its own answerlessness.”

Bk. 2, Ch. 1
Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament (1981)