Home > Work > Dæmonomania (The Ægypt Cycle, #3)
1 " When the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul then alive to see it; the end doesn’t come all at once but passes and repasses over the world like the shivers that pass over a horse’s skin. The coming of the end might at first lift and shake just one county, one neighborhood, and not the others around it; might feelably ripple beneath the feet of these churchgoers and not of these taverngoers down the street, shatter only the peace of this street, this family, this child of this family who at that moment lifts her eyes from the Sunday comics and knows for certain that nothing will ever be the same again. "
― John Crowley , Dæmonomania (The Ægypt Cycle, #3)
2 " Qui non intellegit, aut taceat aut discat: if you don’t get it, shut up or go figure. "
3 " 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 "
4 " 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. "
5 " A foreign nation to which the witch and the sorcerer gave their whole allegiance, where every common human act and feeling was reversed and made into its opposite: where the Savior of mankind was despised and His Cross trampled and shat upon, and the Devil’s fundament worshipped; where persons surrendered their natural dominion over the animals and instead took on animal form themselves; where coupling was done openly in groups and not in the dark alone; where children were not nurtured but aborted and slain, not fed but eaten. Children killed and eaten: not in fable, not to be released unharmed from the wolf’s belly or resurrected from their own boiled bones, but truly killed and eaten like fowl by our neighbors in secret. The ultimate crime, the crime the Roman magistrates once charged the first Christians with, and the Christians their Gnostic rivals and later the Jews who lived among them. When we hear of children killed and eaten we have entered the counterworld, Hell on earth, and it is usual for some, or many, to be hunted down and slain before it is closed and forgotten again. "
6 " He put his hand on the book. To those who have, more will be given, he said. From those who have not will be taken even the little that they have "
7 " Each new age that has befallen us has been very different from the age it succeeds. But passage times—those times that fall in between ages, through which we pass in going from one age to the next—are always in certain ways alike. Passage times, though separated perhaps by centuries, seem (to those within one) to follow immediately upon one another rather than upon the ages they close, or open; they are successive visits to the same place, which at first we don’t recognize, though we know it’s familiar: like days of fever, whose onset we feel but don’t at first identify, what air is this, what earth; after a time of wary puzzling we say Oh yes I know this kind of life, it’s fever, and we allow ourselves to fall back or lie down into it, its former instances accumulating behind us to be remembered, the only days we can distinctly remember as the numbers mount and the mercury bar crosses into triple digits. "
8 " She slipped from her tall chair (why don't we remember living in a world where everything was absurdly outsize, tables and chairs and spoons, door knobs too high to reach, too fat to grasp?) and went to look. "
