John Crowley

"One winter night when he was a boy … he first saw a ring around the moon. He stared up at it, immense, icy, half as wide as the night sky, and grew certain that it could only mean the End of the World…"

"Lately Marge's memory had grown weak, which is to say that it no longer contained the past time on deposit there, it was not strong enough to keep shut up the moments, the mornings and evenings, of he…"

"Prosper's earliest memory was of hearing the enormous Hoover starting up somewhere in the house, brand-new then possibly, anyway unknown to him, an inexplicable noise at once a roar and shriek and com…"

"It seems to him that he extends backwards without beginning and he can't just now remember whether the great tales and plots which he supposes he knows and forever broods on lie in the to-come or lie …"

"Sophie's hard first question to the cards had not, precisely, gone without an answer, it had been transmuted into questions about the question. It had branched and rooted like a tree, growing question…"

"She couldn't see that, though, because the haze out at sea erased the ship long before it could beyond the horizon, drawing after it the other ships. Diane felt the thread of connection between her an…"

"Prosper Olander had never been in a cathedral, but now he felt something like that, the experience of entering suddenly a space so large, so devoted to a single purpose, that the insides of the heart …"

"This was the problem: if what had to be discovered lay in the what-was-to-be, then they could discover that easily enough. It was what-had-been that was hard to keep in mind. That's the way it is for …"