The Solitudes

Written by John Crowley published 1987 . First novel in the Ægypt trilogy.

• a stink like the chyme of a dying beast
• bitterly about dark satanic mills and the intrusion of the Great God Dollar into sylvan loveliness,
• (he was an exquisite striker of antique poses)
• an amateur of several arts,
• he was thirsty and gloating.
• (Seven Sobbes of a Sorrowful Soule for Sinne)
• publish-or-perish
• before their truculent faces.
• follow the left-hand wall
• the big gasbag words,
• smile of pleasant complicity.
• horseplay was threatened,
• there (pigeon’s bones and a rind of cheese),
• There are greater things.
• had seemed the kind of grotesque idea only other people thought of,
• they lay en deshabille
• Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.
• that the great god Pan is dead!
• Pierce didn’t know Climacterics then;
• who seemed to have come to Barnabas chiefly to be instructed in a world of their own imagining.
• certain green hill, Pierce read on: he read Barr and he read Vico and he read the Steganography of Lois Rose;
• Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages
• Effie
• and a loud-of-course tone,
• emotional churchgoing and a special devotion to the Virgin.
• Restlessness, in every sense, was for her like one of those obscure and chronic Victorian maladies that show few symptoms but whose prevention or mitigation is a lifetime’s work.
• “exalted” as Axel said by wine,
• the Sphinx
• Picatrix! Blackest of the black books of the old times,
• Pantomorph, or “omni-form.”
• small-town determinism.
• Freedom of a kind, that changeful dandy’s life, but thin, thin.
• Ryder was Rose too? A popular name around these parts; that made three he knew of already.
• Rosie Rasmussen
• Rose Ryder.
• Rosie Mucho.
• "A thing I've noticed is that a woman who loves a man often will call him by his whole name."
• a Mother from Another World.
• and in the evening returned home
• While there I also studied and wrote,
• went fishing near a grove or in a wood not far from the city.
• Homo solitarius
• truly the cause of a great part of my misery was the stupidity of my sons,