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1 " I was convinced that birds were kinds of souls. Not the souls of people but of previous birds whose mystery and beauty were so necessary on earth that God would not allow them to be anything in their second life but birds again. "
― Howard Norman , The Bird Artist
2 " My mother and Alexis had said no more than ten words to each other. The long silences were deafening "
― Howard Norman , My Darling Detective
3 " There’s a Russian proverb: To taste the ocean, all you need is one gulp. "
4 " Sometimes, you know, it seems I'm only allowed to live life between headaches. "
― Howard Norman , The Museum Guard
5 " I can only repeat what I say to myself day and night: I expect nothing, yet life keeps taking unexpected turns. "
6 " What good is intelligence,' Akutagawa asked, 'if you can't ever discover a useful melancholy? "
― Howard Norman
7 " Friendship is provisional, you have to keep earning it, back and forth, give the gift that's only each other's to give "
8 " Anyway, who in their right mind would ever say a person was supposed to be happy? In your life happiness is either cut to your length or isn't. "
9 " In The Highland Book of Platitudes, Marlais, there's an entry that reads, "Not all ghosts earn our memory in equal measure." I think about this sometimes. I think especially about the word "earn," because it implies an ongoing willful effort on the part of the dead, so that if you believe the platitude, you have to believe in the afterlife, don't you? Following that line of thought, there seem to be certain people—call them ghosts—with the ability to insinuate themselves into your life with more belligerence and exactitude than others—it's their employment and expertise. "
― Howard Norman , What Is Left the Daughter
10 " Everything I loved most happened most every day. "
― Howard Norman , I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place
11 " When I returned, I never once walked past the house where my mother, aunt, and I lved together...It was as if the past would judge me. The house would judge me. That merely looking at it would somehow cause me to calibrate my life, and in all aspects of usefulness I would come up short. "
― Howard Norman , The Haunting of L
12 " I have always thought a person needs to constantly refine the capacity to suspend disbelief in order to keep emotions organized and not suffer debilitating confusion, and I mean just toward the things of daily life. I suppose this admits to a desperate sort of pragmatism. Still, it works for me. What human heart isn’t in extremis? "
― Howard Norman , Next Life Might Be Kinder
13 " Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think about myself. "
14 " The thing unspoken often settles most bitterly in the heart "
15 " When thinking harshly on the human condition, as I so often do, my antidote is to think gently on libraries, for if human beings are capable of preserving the history of our knowledge in the form of books, there there may still be hope. "
16 " If there is a next life yes, I have that hope, for it to be kinder. But probably whatever notion you come up with will be better than anything I could come up with. I'm in a constant state of uncertainty. "
17 " I didn’t know you could break your finger just hanging up clothes. God Almighty, you situate your hand wrong between a blouse and a clothespin and everything suddenly changes. What a stupid life this is.” “Did "
18 " Today I fell to the ground at the pull of memory. There quite seemed a permanence to my defeat. And here I thought, in their profound tug-of-war, present and future would, by sheer shouldering force of will and superior numbers, win out over the past. How wrong I was. —Marghanita Laski "
19 " These broadcasts were of varied content. But all of them took the United States and Canada to task for their anti-Semitism, for not being willing to comprehend and act on the news of the concentration camps early enough, and for continued anti-Semitic policies as they pertained to Jewish refugees. "
20 " All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still; after she is dead. "
