Turning for Home Quotes

“There are days my life snags on and I keep circling back to them. These are the roots of all I do, and if an observer were to lay those days lodged in my memory over the surface of my present, perhaps all my life would be explained, all problems solved, all wounds revealed.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“I could go even further now I’ve started, try to really show her the way I feel, wake her up to what I’ve been through, and tell her my favourite image of what anorexia is like, the final image of Primo Levi’s book The Truce, which I read while I was still in the hospital, ghoulishly devouring tales of Auschwitz because they reminded me a little of myself and hoping none of the nurses would “work out what I was reading. At the end of The Truce, Levi spoke of the morning call at Auschwitz that woke him every day, the cry of ‘Wstawàch’, ‘Get up.’ And he finished by saying he didn’t believe he’d heard it for the last time. He believed that a truce had been called, but it wouldn’t last for ever. And a day would come when he would be lying in bed, and the sound would reach his ears again. The sound of a German voice outside his window calling ‘Get up,’ and the nightmare starting again. That’s what anorexia is like sometimes. I can understand why Levi ended up throwing himself down a stairwell to his death. I can imagine he must have heard the call again. I know what that’s like, to wait for the voice that will summon you home into suffering.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“That was the hardest thing, that in the end nothing was healed by medicine or medical expertise - people recovered because they willed those recoveries into being; they fought until they could live in the world again.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“I can only hope that in time to come, years after I have departed maybe, Hannah and Kate might look back on this as having been the start of something, the beginning of a thawing, of spring between them, and find today has turned into one of those curious, unexpected moments their lives snag on as well, the days that lend the rest of life their pattern and their meaning.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“Too often it’s easy to think of someone like Grandad as being no more than the role he plays in my own life, not as a person who struggles with flesh-and-blood feelings. What he told me about Mum makes me wonder if I’ve been thinking of her that way too. An extraordinary thought – that under their different skins everyone I’ve ever met is feeling the same things I am, experiencing the same little dramas. All the problems of their lives seeming as vast to them, as all-consuming, as my own are to me. And does that mean all those problems must be important, and the world is completely beset around? Or might it mean that, actually, none of it matters at all?”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“I remember a story Mum told me once of a man who tunnelled all the way from England to Australia. I suppose that's what it's like to lose someone. You have to pass all the way through the centre of the earth before you come out into the light again, dizzy with the emptiness of losing something you need and can't have anymore.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home