Ægypt Quotes

“Serenity. Now you could wish for that, naming no conditions: a permanent inner vacation, escape made good. To somehow have this motionlessness that he drew in with the sweet air he inhaled for his inward weather always.

But there were problems too with wishing for moral qualities, serenity, large-mindedness. The interdiction (which Pierce thought obvious) against wishing for such things as artistic abilities -- sit down at the piano, the Appassionata flows suddenly from your fingertips -- applied in a way to wisdom too, to enlightenment, to heart-knowledge, useless unless earned, the earning of it being no doubt all that it consisted of.”
― John Crowley, Ægypt

“In silvergreen rainy April they went down to Glastonbury on the long straight roads ...”
― John Crowley, Ægypt

“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, The Solitudes

“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, Ægypt

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

“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, Ægypt

“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, Aegypt

“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, Ægypt

“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, Ægypt

“There is more than one history of the world.”
― John Crowley, Ægypt

“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, Aegypt

“they slipped one by one again into the merely fictional – Hermes’s false Egypt, and Bruno’s false Hermes; Kraft’s false Bruno; Pierce’s false history of the world, the doors that had once blown open blowing closed again one by one down the corridor into the colored centuries.”
― John Crowley, Aegypt

“Blow it all away, Rosie prayed; blow away summer, bring the hard clear weather. She had had enough summer. She wanted a fire, she wanted to sleep under blankets, she wanted to walk in sweaters under leafless trees, clear and cold inside and out.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“But Pierce, pioneer, knew a thing about mazes, had picked up along his way one crumb of information about mazes: in any maze, of yew or of stone, of zoomorphic topiary or made of glass or of time, put out your hand and follow the left-hand wall wherever it leads. Just keep to the left-hand wall.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“Once the initial discovery had been made—that there was this country, had once been this country, which was somehow the country where the pyramids were and where the Sphinx was but not exactly that country—then it was a matter of decoding what further facts came to his attention, to discover whether they descended from de Mille’s Technicolor country of pharaohs and suntanned slaves and Hebrews, or from the other shadow country: Ægypt: the country of those wise knights, country of forest and mountain and seacoast and a city full of temples where an endless story began.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“Pierce remembering those battered library boxes wondered if perhaps it had been they, those librarians or whoever they were who had filled them, who by sending him some book full of antiquated notions and quaint orthography had first suggested to him the existence of that shadow country, that far old country that was sort of Egypt but not Egypt, no not Egypt at all, a country with a different history, whose name was spelled too with a small but crucial difference: it was not Egypt but Ægypt.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“… many an expelled prince, roaming from court to court, without means, but full of projects and still decked with the splendour of the marvellous East whence he had fled—the king of Armenia, the king of Cyprus, before long the emperor of Constantinople. It is not surprising that the people of Paris should have believed in the tale of the Gipsies, who presented themselves in 1427, “a duke and a count and ten men, all on horseback,” while others, to the number 120, had to stay outside the town. They came from Egypt, they said; the Pope had ordered them, by way of penance for their apostasy, to wander about for seven years, without sleeping in a bed; there had been 1,200 of them, but their king, their queen, and all the others had died on the way; as a mitigation, the Pope had ordered that every bishop and abbot was to give them ten pounds tournois. The people of Paris came in great numbers to see them, and have their fortunes told by women who eased them of their money “by magic arts or in other ways.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“Let’s recognize—though it surprises and confuses us, it’s so—that the facts are not finally extricable from the stories. Outside our stories, outside ourselves, is the historyless, inhuman, utterly other physical world; and within our human lives within that world are our stories, our ramparts, without which we would go mad, as a man prevented from dreaming in the end goes mad. Not true, no: only necessary.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“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.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“Had he heard about this before too, and only forgotten it? Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna: yes, sure, the Virgin returns, because if, when Virgil was writing that line two thousand years ago, the sun was entering Pisces, then on the autumnal equinox it would rise in one two three four five six yes in Virgo. So Virgil it seems knew about this stuff too.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“So every once in a while, a long while, the sun rises one morning in a new sign. It has slipped right out of one and back into the previous one. Right now it rises on the spring equinox in some early degree of the sign Pisces. But it’s always on the move—relative to us, that is, it’s really us who are on the move; and pretty soon—well, astronomically speaking pretty soon, a couple hundred years or so—the sun will begin to rise in the sign of Aquarius. Thus the end of the Piscean Age, which started two-thousand-odd years ago, and the beginning of the Age of Aquarius.” Two thousand years ago, the Piscean age, the world shifts from BC to AD. Jesus. And Jesus was a fish. Oh. “Oh,” said Pierce. “Always precedes, you see,” Earl said dreamily. “Precedes. Before Pisces was Aries the ram, and before that Taurus the bull, and so on.” Moses had ram’s horns, who overthrew the golden bull-calf. And then comes Jesus the fish, two thousand years on, new heaven and new earth, and shepherd Pan flees from the mountainsides. And now the world watched and waited for the man with the water jug.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“Pierce began to find among them bright-clad reissues of books that had meant much to him in childhood, a childhood that had been largely spent between the covers of books, one way and another, a childhood he found he was able to taste again by cracking the same books, unseen since antiquity, since his own Age of Gold.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“something had been stolen from him, he had stolen something from himself, a pearl of great price, that he had forgotten the value of and had thrown away thoughtlessly, and now could never have again.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“That was the feeling he had felt in the window seat, too, having looked up Moses in a dozen places in the old Britannica, and finding that picture, and seeing that horned head, unexplained, unmentioned even in the picture’s caption. They had been there all along, those horns, though he hadn’t known it, and now he did, and there was an explanation for them too that he didn’t know but that he could learn. And that was History.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“There’s more than one History of the World, you know,” he said. “Isn’t there? More than one. One for each of us, maybe. Wouldn’t you say so?”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“I would listen, and discover what questions people asked, that history might answer, or help to answer, even if at first they didn’t seem to be historical questions; and I’d try to answer them. In a book, I suppose, probably, or maybe not.” “Questions like …” “Questions that come up. I remember there was an old woman who lived over my father’s shop. She read cards, told fortunes. She was a Gypsy, my father said, and that’s why people went to her. But why, I asked him, do people think Gypsies can tell fortunes? History could answer that. Give an account, you see.” He set down his finished drink; his grin had begun again to grow, his chuckle to rumble in his throat. “The only trouble would be that damn tendency to generalism. I suppose that the first question I tried to answer would lead me to others, and those to others, and so on; and there being no publish-or-perish sort of pressure, no impetus to stop asking and start answering, I might go on forever. End up with the History of the World. Or a history, anyway.” He took, with plump fingers, the olive from his glass, and chewed it thoughtfully. “Incomplete, probably, in the end. Unfinished. Oh, yes. But still I think I would consider myself to have been practicing history.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“Understandable, of course,” he went on. “Even inevitable, when so much new material continually surfaces, new methods of investigation are worked out. Computers. Amazing how the past continually enlarges, instead of shrinking with distance.” He lifted the glass. There was a gold wedding band imbedded deep in the flesh of his ring finger. “Still,” tiny sip completed, “little room now for the generalist. Unfortunate, if that’s where your talents lie.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“Specialization,” Barr said when they had seated themselves on the cracked leather banquette of a paneled hotel bar, the professor’s choice. “That’s the great problem for scholars now. More and more about less and less.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“Frank Barr hoped Pierce would do a thesis under his direction, perhaps taking up a theme Barr himself had wanted to pursue but had never been able to—he suggested the spread of Nestorian Christian churches in the Dark Ages, to India, China, sub-Saharan Africa: Marco Polo had come upon surviving congregations in Cathay, and myths of Issa, Jesus, could still be heard by astonished missionaries in the Sudan in the nineteenth century. What had they made out of the Christian story they carried so far, isolated through the centuries from Rome, from Byzantium? Fascinating. But Pierce, though intrigued (Barr could intrigue anyone), quailed before the labor involved, primary sources in six or eight languages, untrodden ground, expeditions in pith helmet and Land Rover for all he knew. He stayed with Renaissance Studies, though always sensing Barr’s never-expressed judgment; he discovered a collection of Elizabethan confessional literature at the Noate library (Seven Sobbes of a Sorrowful Soule for Sinne) and planned a brief, elegant thesis on these and their relation to certain themes in Shakespeare, particularly Measure for Measure, in his proposal making austerity a virtue (“In restricting myself to this seemingly narrow compass,” etc., etc., as though to do so had been a hard choice) and getting it accepted by a tolerant old fart in the English department.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes

“One had no color, was background only. Two was a deep green, somehow silken. Three was heraldic red, and four battle gray. Five was gold, six white; seven was a China blue, and eight black as antique evening dress. Nine was a dull beige. The nought was again colorless, though a dark vacancy where the one was a light vacancy. It was the first number—the number after the one, in dates after the first millennium A.D.—that determined the century color, and the next number the special color of the year; the last number was accent, glinting here and there in the tapestry. Thus some famous events were more present to his mind than others; 1066 had not much spectacle, but 1215 when the lords in green silken surcoats and gold chains sat down on the greensward with the gold-crowned king was an unforgettable scene.”
― John Crowley, The Solitudes