28 Quotes by Norman Lock

We may not realize it, but every point during the passage of our lives is a point of no return -- except for what memory permits.

A sour view of things, I grant you; but one borne out by the history of our age and of the age to come, when Trinity--not the Christians' but Oppenheimer's--will turn Alamogordo sand to glass. In the future, dead cities will molder behind rusting thorns no prince can ever penetrate; dirty bombs will engender tribes of lepers--not by germs, but by deadly atoms; and radioactive isotopes will be left to cool for an age or more, sealed in burial chambers with a pharaoh's curse.

Hatred is unattractive, but it’s also irresistible. If men were honest with themselves, they’d admit it’s a stronger passion than lust.

I hammered on the Poes’ front door like Alaric on the gates of Rome. Poe said that a gaudy figure of speech was a silk cravat around a dirty neck. He didn’t say whether the truth lay in the plain thing or in its fancy.

A sour view of things, I grant you; but one borne out by the history of our age and of the age to come, when Trinity – not the Christians’ but Oppenheimer’s – will turn Alamogordo sand to glass. In the future, dead cities will molder behind rusting thorns no prince can ever penetrate; dirty bombs will engender tribes of lepers – not by germs, but by deadly atoms; and radioactive isotopes will be left to cool for an age or more, sealed in burial chambers with a pharaoh’s curse.

The negatives he did manage were made in the hour or two when the sun seemed to rally with a yellowy light reminiscent of an egg yolk; usually, it looked pale as a pearl on the steely blue or leaden sky above the snow-scrubbed lake. That’s a purple passage fit for a novel but hardly descriptive of the actuality of that winter, which was almost past enduring.

Anna and I did not make love. I don’t remember why. Maybe we didn’t need to. She might have been afraid, although I doubt she was afraid of much. She’d been a midwife before she opened a studio; she’d held life in her hands, like a wire from a galvanic cell. Maybe death was too strong in me for an act so inspirited with life. Although I sometimes think that death is what gives lovemaking its desperate and terrible joy.

I insist on caprice as a necessary countermeasure to slavery. Otherwise, my own dictatorial mind must take – unknown to me – its instructions from a mastermind.

The raft was seized, with a noise like needles knitting, and we were hemmed in for winter – river and the old channel’s oxbow lake having frozen solid. By now, we guessed we were not two ordinary river travelers... it must have been the river that was extraordinary: a marvel that protected us by the same mysterious action that had given a common horse wings and changed a woman into a laurel tree.