Ka Quotes

“Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“And I thought, no, the dead are there, and do know themselves and others. I know it’s so; it can’t be otherwise. To be dead, though, isn’t to have further life like ours, just elsewhere; nor is it to live on in the memories of others, or in the dark aliveness of tombs, or in the voices that the still-embodied believe they hear. It’s not like any story that any traveler to that realm has told, or any spirit claiming to have come out of that land either. No. But I believe that even though their life is divided forever from the life we live in the day and the sun, we can know something of it: because we live part of our lives the way they do, in a realm that’s like the realm where they are. I mean in dreams.

In dreams we traverse other geographies; we walk the roads, we enter the rooms, we speak to the people and beings we encounter. We meet our kin and our dead, just as they were in their youth and in ours, or transfigured, not themselves. We see and hear but can’t quite smell or touch. We know ourselves to be there while we are there, but we don’t know we know: it’s only when we wake that we know what we saw and heard and felt. Usually we know that we saw and felt much more, but we can’t retrieve it, and so the experience of it is lost for good; in effect it was never ours.

And I thought that it must be the same in the sleep of death: there, too, we will do deeds, learn truths, pass through landscapes, meet other souls, think about the living, ponder, feel terror and delight, go always further. The difference is this: from death we will never, never ever, wake to know of it.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“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, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“He had no name for it in the language of Ka; there was no name for it because he was the first Crow ever to feel it within him. Pity for them in the awful complications of the lives they built for themselves, laboring as helplessly and ceaselessly as bees building their combs, but their combs held no honey, he thought now. Useless, useless, and worse than useless, needless: the labor of their lives, the battles and deaths, and all their own doing. He lifted his wings to fly, to fly from this pity, but he could not; folded them in disorder; bowed with open mouth in pity.
If only he had not gone into Ymr. For out of Ymr he had brought pity into Ka, and now could never get it out.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“Well, they should be glad, then, he said, that we did it, shouldn't they? That we stole Death's death from them, I mean, so that they could never have it, no matter how hard they tried, no matter how much they wanted it. That was good for them, wasn't it? Aren't they lucky?
You're asking me? the Coyote said. He crawled out from his hidey-hole, lifted a hind leg to pass a few drops of water. Overhead Crows were calling Crows to feast, heading in numbers for the mountain at the end of Ymr.
Well I think they are, Dar Oakley said. And what have we ever got for it?
Stories, Coyote said. Not to tell you something you don't already know. We're made of stories now, brother. It's why we never die even if we do.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“... girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was to go through.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“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, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“Dar Oakley said nothing. Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“I know that things can’t stay the same, that change is the whole of the law: but that not just the human world but the earth and the weather and life itself could be different at the end of a single lifetime from how it was at the beginning . . . you feel that the world, the earth, can die along with you. Can it? How can I believe that all around me is ruination unless I believe it was once as it should be, and I was alive then to see it? And how am I to know that this is so?”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“Nothing was stranger to Crows than this: how People thought that only by their own actions would the seasons be made to turn, the days grow warm after winter and the green things grow up that they planted. They thought the sun was a person like them, and did what it pleased; on the longest of winter nights, they must fire a great pile of dry brush on a hilltop to cause the sun to wake and rise rather than remaining below the daywise edge of the world. The Crows knew the world had no edge, because they flew, and could see the steady arising of it up from the far-off, tree by hill, and then beneath them and away—but the People didn’t know it and wouldn’t have believed the Crows if the Crows had told them. But People knew the day on which the season of the long sun changed into the season of the short sun; they knew when the moon would brighten and when it would darken, and for how long: and about those things they were never wrong.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“We're made of stories now brother. Its why we don't die even when we do.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“We're made of stories now, brother. It's why we never die even if we do.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“That was what did the harm, knowing the one, believeing the other.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“C'était le plus douloureux, savoir une chose et croire l'autre. Il se disait que ça le tuerait, ce printemps-là, mais il se trompait ; et, quand vint le printemps suivant, puis encore le suivant, il comprit qu'il n'en mourrait pas. Ce n'était plus un malheur qui le frappait, mais un malheur qui l'avait jadis frappé. C'était douloureux d'une autre manière qui ne s'effacerait jamais.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“Mais en réalité, c'est seulement aujourd'hui qu'il le comprend, au moment où il en parle, à savoir que, dans un pays où tout n'est que symbole, on n'a besoin que d'un exemplaire de chaque : un château, un roi, un amoureux, un rival, un enfant, un animal, un poisson, un oiseau, une dent, un œil, une coupe, un lit. Tous ne sont que ce qu'ils représentent, et c'est ce qu'ils représentent qui change.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“Non, elles savent ce qu'est la mort, elles se lamentent, mais, pour elles, les défunts ne sont plus là ; ils ne sont nulle part — dans une oubliette du cœur, dans la mémoire voire dans une histoire, mais ce ne sont plus des présences auxquelles on peut parler, auxquelles apporter ou demander du réconfort. Ce ne sont pas des morts à aimer ou à craindre.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“L'aube n'est pas silencieuse, mais elle est sous-peuplée.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“I’ve learned...that here you can never go back the way you came. That you never do anywhere. You only and always go on.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“I couldn’t weep here, any more than I could hope. Of course he couldn’t stay: and much as I wanted him by me, I wanted even more that my friend have what he wanted for himself.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“He had thought the story was *theirs*, People's, that he was in it by chance, somehow impelled into it by reasons not his, that it was a thing torn out of Ymr that shouldn't be in Ka at all. But Kits was right, it was he who'd been in it, not People, however much they wanted to be and he had not. It was his story, and the stories about the story were his too. He was girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was through.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“Well, I can talk that way if you like,” Dar Oakley said. “But talking can’t change that. Can’t change she into he.” She slid down the muddy lake-edge to a pool where she’d seen a thing growing whose leaves or root she wanted. When she had it and broke a leaf and sniffed it, she put a handful into a skin pouch slung over her bare chest. “It’s because I can’t be called ‘neither,’ ” she said. “But that’s what I am.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“Fox Cap—now herself complete—sat herself down among them. Her cap was on her head, for (just as he had thought she would) she’d got it back from them. Those around her petted her and with their fingers they fed her this and that, a tiny wan thing amid their overbearing fatness.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“He was looking into a still forest pool when he found himself, his reflected face ringed by fallen leaves: a Crow of this place. He seemed to be looked at by that face, as though by another Crow, who knew something about him that he didn’t; and in a flash of certainty he knew that in truth he wasn’t this Crow whose face he saw, or hadn’t always been. He had been another Crow in other times; and there were times when he had not been at all. Whenever Dar Oakley finds himself—as by now he has done over and over—he finds more of himself than he found the time before.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“The Crows of the region could have told them that there are almost always more Crows around them than they can see; but like the few snowflakes that fall on your tongue or autumn leaves you can catch, it’s only the ones you can count that matter.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“that here you can never go back the way you came. That you never do anywhere. You only and always go on.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“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 so 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, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“Crows may be many, Crows may be few, but one Crow alone is no Crows, that’s the truth.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“Old Turtle lives at the bottom of the Beautiful Lake of the North. He is the oldest being there is, and therefore the wisest. Also his ancestor was the being on whose back the world was made.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“People can have many names, or they could then: they shed one and gain another, or they have a name in one place and a different name elsewhere; a name they give and a name they keep. Dar Oakley’s name for One Ear was Hider; his name for Dar Oakley was Seeker.”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“One Crow alone is no Crows:”
― John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr