Barney Norris

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.

Perhaps all adult life was an attempt to keep alight the fires that burned when you were young.

The world holds no trace of what happens in it unless we carve it in with violence or concrete.

The old are a regular subject for sympathy.

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

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.

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.

One thing a death will do is make you reflect on how many kinds of love there are to be experienced in the world.

Every bar in the scores of ourselves is already into memory into imagination, even as we play it out. We might as well listen.

[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.