# Quote — John Crowley, Four Freedoms

> We weren't where we were in those times because we had been thrown or moved there. We didn't think so. We felt we had impelled ourselves, like the faring pioneers and immigrants driving their wagons or pushing their barrows who somewhere somehow along the way stopped and settled. [...] True, in some places we stayed on where our fathers and mothers and grandfathers had first settled, but even so we were caught up in that motion if our parents and grandparents had happened to settle in places that those on the move were now headed for or drawn to—seemingly blown to, you might think seeing them, as by those cosmic tornadoes that lift a boy on a bicycle or a chicken coop full of chickens or a ford car with Gramps and Gram inside and set it down unharmed somewhere else.

- Author: [John Crowley](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-crowley.md)
- Book: [Four Freedoms](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-crowley/four-freedoms.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Crowley#Four_Freedoms_(2009)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-crowley/four-freedoms/we-werent-where

## More from this book

> There is a philosophical, or metaphysical position that can be taken–maybe its a scientific hypothesis–that the past cannot in fact exist. Everything that can possibly exist exists now. Things now may be expressive of some conceivable or describable past state of affairs, yes:but that's different from saying this this former state actually somehow exists in the form of "the past". Even in our memory[...]there is no past:no scenes preserved with all their sights and sounds. Merely fleeting states of mind, myriad points assembled for a moment to make a new picture (but "picture" is wrong too, too full, too fixed) of what we think are former states of things: things that once were, or may have been the case.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-crowley/four-freedoms/there-is-a-philosophical.md)

> You went around back, where in the playground kids were dangling from the jungle gym waiting for mothers; connie could feel their cold skinned knees and barked knuckles–Bunce always said that imagining pain and discomfort was worse for her than the real thing when it came, which it almost never did.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-crowley/four-freedoms/you-went-around.md)

> "Listen," she said. "I get off in an hour. Sit in the back. I'll see you then."
>
> As though they'd agreed to this a long time ago. That was the sign, he was as yet unused to noticing it but he was learning: that sensation that the future has already happened and is only bringing itself about in staging these present moments.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-crowley/four-freedoms/listen-she-said.md)