Barney Norris > Quotes

“Now I am old I wish the young man I used to be had worried less about the past and lived more heedlessly in the present. I suppose I did as much living as I could. But I burn to tell men and women who are still young now how quickly it is going to get behind them, how fiercely they ought to love it while they can.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“Perhaps all adult life was an attempt to keep alight the fires that burned when you were young.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“The world is full of things put off for the wrong reasons, which can suddenly become impossible without any warning. They hang in the air like ghosts, their mouths sewn up forever. They will never be able to speak, but if it was you who put them there, you will always be forced to see them.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“[Life] has been passing since the day he was born, and everything he puts off, chooses not to do or say because he is hoarding experience for his real, adult life isn't a thing safeguarded but a treasure risked. The world is full of things put off for the wrong reasons, which can suddenly become impossible without warning. They hang in the air like ghosts, their mouths and eyes sewn up forever. They will never be able to speak, but if it was you who put them there, you will always be forced to see them.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“That was the hardest thing, that in the end nothing was healed by medicine or medical expertise - people recovered because they willed those recoveries into being; they fought until they could live in the world again.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“The mind is like a floodplain. The slightest rainfall can leave it awash with old stories that seep into your newer terrors and swell them, drown you under long-forgotten feelings as your life rushes over you.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“There are days my life snags on and I keep circling back to them. These are the roots of all I do, and if an observer were to lay those days lodged in my memory over the surface of my present, perhaps all my life would be explained, all problems solved, all wounds revealed.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“I could go even further now I’ve started, try to really show her the way I feel, wake her up to what I’ve been through, and tell her my favourite image of what anorexia is like, the final image of Primo Levi’s book The Truce, which I read while I was still in the hospital, ghoulishly devouring tales of Auschwitz because they reminded me a little of myself and hoping none of the nurses would “work out what I was reading. At the end of The Truce, Levi spoke of the morning call at Auschwitz that woke him every day, the cry of ‘Wstawàch’, ‘Get up.’ And he finished by saying he didn’t believe he’d heard it for the last time. He believed that a truce had been called, but it wouldn’t last for ever. And a day would come when he would be lying in bed, and the sound would reach his ears again. The sound of a German voice outside his window calling ‘Get up,’ and the nightmare starting again. That’s what anorexia is like sometimes. I can understand why Levi ended up throwing himself down a stairwell to his death. I can imagine he must have heard the call again. I know what that’s like, to wait for the voice that will summon you home into suffering.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“What do people do with their lives? I mean seriously, literally, hour for hour, what does everyone do? When I was at school I felt perfectly ordinary, just like anyone else, but now it is as if I have forgotten how. I have to do impersonations of a real human being to fit in anywhere or even get served in the supermarket. I have lost my instinct and taste for life, and my days feel like eating with a cold now, knowing you need soup, swallowing, not being able to taste it.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“That's how it is with a thing like grief as well. It lies oil slick over everything you do. It will pour out through the gaps in the most ordinary afternoons.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“Every bar in the score of ourselves is receding already into memory, into imagination, even as we play it out. We might as well listen.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“One thing a death will do is make you reflect on how many kinds of love there are to be experienced in the world.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“Every bar in the scores of ourselves is already into memory into imagination, even as we play it out. We might as well listen.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“The thing about stone is you don't get to the heart of it. It stares back into you, its secret intact and inviolable.”
― Barney Norris

“Too often it’s easy to think of someone like Grandad as being no more than the role he plays in my own life, not as a person who struggles with flesh-and-blood feelings. What he told me about Mum makes me wonder if I’ve been thinking of her that way too. An extraordinary thought – that under their different skins everyone I’ve ever met is feeling the same things I am, experiencing the same little dramas. All the problems of their lives seeming as vast to them, as all-consuming, as my own are to me. And does that mean all those problems must be important, and the world is completely beset around? Or might it mean that, actually, none of it matters at all?”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“The world holds no trace of what happens in it unless we carve it in with violence or concrete.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“The old are a regular subject for sympathy.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“I can only hope that in time to come, years after I have departed maybe, Hannah and Kate might look back on this as having been the start of something, the beginning of a thawing, of spring between them, and find today has turned into one of those curious, unexpected moments their lives snag on as well, the days that lend the rest of life their pattern and their meaning.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“Grief's not like a cancer, doesn't go when the operation's done and the darkness is out. It's a knife wound. Take out the blade and you still go the bleeding, wait long enough, and it turns to a scar, but it's always with you the rest of your life.”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

“I remember a story Mum told me once of a man who tunnelled all the way from England to Australia. I suppose that's what it's like to lose someone. You have to pass all the way through the centre of the earth before you come out into the light again, dizzy with the emptiness of losing something you need and can't have anymore.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“You know the moment after a child has fallen on its hands and can't decide whether it has hurt itself enough to cry or whether it would rather get on with playing? That was what I saw while they were checking him on the kerb, the child buried deep under the surface of that old man's face, hopelessly out of his depth, hopelessly uncertain. Because we never really grow up, do we?”
― Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain