Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“[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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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