John Crowley Quotations

We're seeing gangrenous legs ... people are going to lose limbs at this point. They're actually going to have to go to surgery and get them cut off.

We decided we wanted the hospitals to have an opportunity to digest this information (before) we would issue a press release,

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.

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.

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

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.

I think the fact that it's character driven meant that however technically complicated it got on set, I was always directing actors.

I thought the kids played their hearts out.

It dialed the Yellow Cab Co. in Brockton.

I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover.

With some people I'm sure that trust has been regained, and some people are still a 'Show Me' kind of thing... I think Fletcher Allen has made a great deal of progress.

This, there was no comparison. It was probably the largest mass casualty incident anybody had responded to.

The state has made efforts, intensive efforts as I understand it, to get people to sign up.

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.

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

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.

The cab driver gave the officer an earring he found inside his cab right after he dropped the fare off,

This is the first time in history that we've evacuated a whole city,

They played a very up-tempo game, which is what we wanted from the beginning. This was probably the most complete game we played in about three weeks. We did a nice job overall.

It's glorious, because the story is always moving forward through the dialogue. So I always felt on very safe ground with the script.

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.

All of the hospitals, we think, are doing well, ... And of course that's our job, to determine that they do well -- but not too well. That's what this whole process is about.

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.

The things that make us happy make us wise.

Well, do you do that consciously?" Daily Alice asked, only partly of Cloud. "Do what?" Cloud said. "Grow up? No. Well. In a sense. You see it's inevitable, or refuse to. You greet it or don't -- take it in trade, maybe, for all you're going to lose anyway. Or you can refuse, and have what you've got to lose snatched from you, and never take payment -- never see a trade is possible.

The further in you go, the bigger it gets.

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.

The universe is Time's body.

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.

First, she wanted to taste the sweat that shone on his throat and fragile clavicle; then he chose to undo the tails of her shirt, that she had tied up beneath her breasts; then, but then impatient they forgot about taking turns and quarreled silently, eagerly over each other, like pirates dividing treasure long sought, long imagined, long withheld.

Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

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.

Violet said nothing, though big pearly tears, like a child's, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn't understand them really, he would receive reverently, and out of him would come then the advice, the warnings, the clever decisions she could never have made.

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.

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.

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious.