Howard Norman Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think about myself.

Howard Norman

#3. 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

#4. 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.

Howard Norman

#5. I can only repeat what I say to myself day and night: I expect nothing, yet life keeps taking unexpected turns.

Howard Norman

#6. What good is intelligence,' Akutagawa asked, 'if you can't ever discover a useful melancholy?

Howard Norman

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Everything I loved most happened most every day.

Howard Norman