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Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1) QUOTES

Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1) QUOTES

1 " 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 (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

2 " 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 (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

3 " In silvergreen rainy April they went down to Glastonbury on the long straight roads ... "

― John Crowley , Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

4 " 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 , Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

5 " There is more than one history of the world. "

― John Crowley , Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

6 " 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 (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

7 " 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 , Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

8 " 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 , Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

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

― John Crowley , Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

10 " Plutarch records that in the early years of the reign of Tiberius the pilot of a ship rounding the Greek archipelago passed a certain island at dawn on the solstice day and heard his name called from shore: “Thamus! When you come near the Palodes, tell them that the great god Pan is dead!” He thought at first to refuse, being afraid, but when he came opposite the Palodes, he called out the words as he had heard them: “Pan is dead! The great god Pan is dead!” And then there arose from the island a lamenting and wailing, not of one voice but of many mingled, as though the earth itself mourned. A shiver ran up Pierce’s spine beneath the blanket. He had read this story before, and had shivered then too. "

― John Crowley , Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

11 " 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 , Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

12 " 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 (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

13 " 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 (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)

14 " En ciel un dieu, en terre une déesse, "

― John Crowley , Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)