Howard Norman > Quotes

“What good is intelligence,' Akutagawa asked, 'if you can't ever discover a useful melancholy?”
― Howard Norman

“Friendship is provisional, you have to keep earning it, back and forth, give the gift that's only each other's to give”
― Howard Norman

“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.”
― Norman, Howard

“Everything I loved most happened most every day.”
― Howard Norman, I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

“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

“Early on, I'd got a sample of how Cornelia Tell questioned all motives for politeness. I'd sat down and said, "Would it be too much trouble if I got a scone with my coffee?" Cornelia Tell shot back, "Even if it does cause me trouble, do you still want a scone?" I never put it that way again, believe me. I just said, "I'd like a scone.”
― Howard Norman, What Is Left the Daughter

“I can only repeat what I say to myself day and night: I expect nothing, yet life keeps taking unexpected turns.”
― Howard Norman, The Museum Guard: A Novel

“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

“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.”
― Howard Norman, My Darling Detective

“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

“We don't often remember our lives in original chronologies, do we? More in associative patterns”
― Howard Norman

“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.”
― Howard Norman, Next Life Might Be Kinder

“Yasunari Kawabata wrote: “When speaking of those who take their own lives, it is always most dignified to use silence or at least restrained language, for the ones left most vulnerable and most deeply hurt by such an occurrence can feel oppressed by the louder assertions of understanding, wisdom and depth of remorse foisted upon them by others. One must ask: Who is best served by speculation? Who is really able to comprehend? Perhaps we must, as human beings, continue to try and comprehend, but we will fall short. And the falling short will deepen our sense of emptiness.”
― Howard Norman, I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

“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”
― Howard Norman, The Bird Artist

“Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think about myself.”
― Howard Norman, The Bird Artist

“Life should always take precedence; when a wedding meets a funeral on the road, the funeral should step aside.”
― Howard Norman, The Ghost Clause

“The thing unspoken often settles most bitterly in the heart”
― Howard Norman, My Darling Detective

“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.”
― Howard Norman, Next Life Might Be Kinder

“Muriel and Zachary's Maine coon cat was named 'Epilogue' for the fact that he concludes the lives of so many mice.”
― Howard Norman, The Ghost Clause

“A poem reaches out exactly halfway, then you reach out halfway, then see what happens. If your thinking's willful and generous toward a poem, the poem'll be equally those things back. As for meaning, it'll mean something different to each person.”
― Howard Norman, What Is Left the Daughter

“any given moment can suddenly fill you with a sense of elegiac anticipation.”
― Howard Norman, The Ghost Clause: A Novel

“There’s a Russian proverb: To taste the ocean, all you need is one gulp.”
― Howard Norman, My Darling Detective

“I bet he's hightailed it into Canada. Somewhere into Canada." "Let me put it this way. Basically, there's Canada and there's the United States of America, and Orkney, since he was a boy, never had one spark of interest in going to the latter.”
― Howard Norman, The Bird Artist

“In the morning, look out and let the landscape take up full residence in your heart before all is intervened by the sound of human voices.”
― Howard Norman, The Ghost Clause

“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

“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.”
― Howard Norman, My Darling Detective

“Sometimes, you know, it seems I'm only allowed to live life between headaches.”
― Howard Norman, The Museum Guard

“Jews in the Old Country called the cemetery the 'Village of the Still-Living'. I'd like to be remembered by loved ones so strongly in that way, as if I'm still here, wouldn't you? I would.”
― Howard Norman, The Museum Guard

“The heart is seldom rational - the mind, sometimes.”
― Howard Norman, The Ghost Clause

“I stand accused of bringing you more bad than good news. At times, and we are in such a time now, at times in human history, bad is disproportionate to good, and so I own up to the indictment. It's a fact of life, my Canadian brethren, that we cannot always control where the truth comes from, or how bad it turns out to be, or what it reveals about human nature.”
― Howard Norman, The Museum Guard