Top 40 John Crowley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”

— John Crowley

2. “The things that make us happy make us wise.”

— John Crowley

3. “The further in you go, the bigger it gets.”

— John Crowley

4. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

5. “Men are men, but Man is a woman. – Chesterton.”

— John Crowley

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

9. “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

10. “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

11. “There are things in your past, preserved in memory almost by chance, that only later on, because of the course your own life takes, come to seem proleptic, or significant, or fascinating, when other things don’t.”

— John Crowley

12. “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

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

— John Crowley

14. “Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.”

— John Crowley

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

15. “Qui non intellegit, aut taceat aut discat: if you don’t get it, shut up or go figure.”

— John Crowley

16. “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.”

— John Crowley

17. “The universe is Time’s body.”

— John Crowley

18. “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

19. “Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.”

— John Crowley

20. “Christmas succeeds Christmas rather than the days it follows.”

— John Crowley

21. “Everybody grows up by leaps, and not by a steady climb like a mountaineer.”

— John Crowley

22. “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

23. “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.”

— John Crowley

24. “There is more than one history of the world.”

— John Crowley

25. “He wavered suddenly, doubted doubts. He looked at his big beloved.”

— John Crowley

26. “A streak of presence surrounded by a dim glow of absence.”

— John Crowley

27. “It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.”

— John Crowley

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

— John Crowley

29. “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.”

— John Crowley

30. “Aristotle says clearly, and St. Thomas follows him, that corporeal similitudes excite the memory more easily than the naked notions themselves.”

— John Crowley

31. “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

32. “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.”

— John Crowley

33. “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

34. “When you return home, you’ll tell the story of how you sought it and failed, and that story will be told and told again. And when you’re dead yourself, the story will go on being told, and in that telling you’ll speak and act and be alive again.”

— John Crowley

35. “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.”

— John Crowley

36. “They wanted eternal life; he gave them perpetual motion. It comes to the same thing, for such a race.”

— John Crowley

37. “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.”

— John Crowley

38. “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

39. “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

40. “One of the virtues of drink was how it reduced life to these simple matters, which engaged all the attention; seeing, walking, raising a bottle accurately to the hole in your face. As though you were two years old again. No thoughts but simple ones. And.”

— John Crowley

41. “Letting the task be master is a hard task for men, hardest of all for the angel’s children, however distantly descended. But it could be learned: learned is the only way it could be learned, for I am a man. Far away and long ago the angels struggled in great anguish with the world, struggled unceasingly; but I would learn, yes, in the long engine summer of the world I would learn to live with it, I would.”

— John Crowley

42. “It struck Rosie that nowadays everyone lived the way gay men like Kraft had always lived; in brief collisions, restless, among lovers whom there was no way to fix except for as long as you could hold their hands. And then what? And then remember them, and keep in touch: friends.”

— John Crowley

43. “For it is in the passage-times that fall between ages – when the laws of an old world weaken and begin to fail and the laws of the new are not yet in force – that we are visited with the notion that time is malleable, that the future is up for shaping, that nothing is fixed: then we are brushed by that wing, and it is the only call we will get.”

— John Crowley

44. “Feeling intensely the shopkeeper’s impatience at his free use of a place of business for profitless shelter, Auberon had begun staring at the various bottles, and at last bought the rum because the girl on its label, in a peasant blouse, arms full of green cane-stalks, reminded him of Sylvie; or rather seemed to him what Sylvie would look like if she were imaginary.”

— John Crowley

45. “In the twilight of the world that we inhabit there will come to some on soft, silent wings a strange understanding: that things have not always been the way they are, and that therefore they need not always be as they have been. And Hegel says that this understanding is itself the sign that indeed the night is coming, that maybe the morning will be ours to see.” Hegel.”

— John Crowley

46. “He had the funny feeling that doors long bolted within him were being forced, that in the general amnesty of carnival something jailed in him since puberty was being let out – somewhat by mistake – into the open air, to be welcomed by the cheering mob.”

— John Crowley

47. “She began to laugh. You will wander, and live in many houses. “Many houses!”

— John Crowley

48. “Carrying a torch,” George Mouse called it, and Auberon, who had never heard the old phrase, thought it just, because he thought of the torch he carried not as a penitential or devotional one, but as Sylvie. He carried a torch: her. She flared brightly sometimes, sank low other times; he saw by her, though he had no path in particular he wanted to see.”

— John Crowley

49. “A secret is not a thing you’re not supposed to tell; it is a thing that can’t be told.”

— John Crowley