John Crowley Quotes

Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.

It's funny how you get a bit older and become more accepting of things. When you're in your twenties, you're skeptical of everything. I definitely felt like that.

I'm not scared of growing up, but it just happens, doesn't it?

No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.

My brother and I have a profound nostalgia for our youth, and I think people need to come to terms with things leaving and being gone.

Oh, September! It is so soon for you to lose your friends to good work and strange loves and high ambitions. The sadness of that is too grown-up for you. Like whiskey and voting, it is a dangerous and heady business, as heavy as years. If I could keep your little tribe together forever, I would. I do so want to be generous. But some stories sprout bright vines that tendril off beyond our sight, carrying the folk we love best with them, and if I knew how to accept that with grace, I would share the secret.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how much, how often, or how closely you keep an eye on things because you can't control it. Sometimes things and people just go. Just like that.

You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.

Everything. Things you lost. Things you’re gonna lose. Everything. Here’s where it all ties together.

Even in a fantasy realm, growing up is accomplished not without cost.

Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.

There was no closing my eyes and sliding back into that blissful dream of normal. This was my normal now.

To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death.

Refusal to accept the flow of the world is the root of all misery.

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.

As far as change, anyone from the age of 13 to 19, you become a whole new person because you grow up. There was so much that I didn't know or that I thought I knew because I was just a 13-year-old at the time who thought I knew everything. But I realized very quickly that, no, there's so much about everything that I don't. So what I've at least tried to do is accept that I don't know everything. Life is so much more fun that way. And it's easier. I've just been trying to learn, rather than to pretend that I'm perfect.

If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost.

We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.

I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you've got, instead of what you don't.

man cannot control the current of events. he can only float with them and steer

We're all really happy with what's familiar. But what's inevitable in life is change. That's what life is.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans resist change. Change will occur; vacuums will be filled.

It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case.

It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you.