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”

“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.”

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

“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.”