Heaven and Hurricanes Quotes

“What did it say about me that all of my favorite novels fell somewhere between a love letter and a suicide note?”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“The truth is, I was never a nihilist at all. I just wore nihilism like a shield to protect my unrelenting tragic optimism.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Some boys grow up to be great men, some grow up to be great fathers, and while most grow up to be neither, none grow up to be both.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“A world full of dreamers has been shaken awake to a nightmarish reality where the passionate end up penniless and to survive means to sacrifice the soul.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Books are just like Rorschach tests. The patterns we find in a book’s ink reveal far more about us than they do about them. Our feelings, reviews, perceptions, and understandings of a book — as well as the meaning, value, and patterns we find within them — always say more about us than they do about the book.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Once you acknowledge that accusations of guilt are always shouted loudest by the guilty, then you quickly realize that indictments are just another form of confession — that the things we hate and condemn in this world reveal a hell of a lot more about us than the things we love and cherish.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Your career is not your epitaph.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Hemingway once said that ‘there is nothing to writing, you just sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’ What Hemingway failed to mention is that bleeding is the easy part. To cut is what makes writing hard. Sitting down to write and hitting that first key or touching the tip of your pen to that blank sheet of paper - that’s the hard part. Once you start - once you spill that first bit of ink and let it bleed into the page, the rest takes care of itself. There’s nothing to it. You just sit there and bleed until it stops. It is not for this reason, but it’s still interesting and worth mentioning that the word ‘write’ comes from the Proto-Germanic word ‘writan,’ which literally meant to scratch, tear, or cut.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“The only freedom that exists lies in getting to choose how your freedom is lost.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“It doesn’t matter if someone drowns in a bathtub, a swimming pool, a lake, or an ocean. It doesn’t matter if someone drowns in five feet of water or a hundred. Drowning is drowning. Regardless of depth or source, your lungs still fill with water which prevents you from breathing, which prevents oxygen from being delivered to your heart, which causes you to panic and to die. No one in this world who drowns, drowns more or less than anyone else.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Those without truth need stories. Stories that can reignite for them the romance between reason and reality. Stories that can help them perceive poetically what they are incapable or unwilling to see scientifically.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“My greatest fear in that moment was that my silence might be misunderstood as disinterest, disregard, or disrespect — that my anxiety would be perceived as apathy.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“It’s a sad truth that in life, the people who hurt us the most are also the people who love us the most, and that they often do so with the best of intentions.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“For a second, I thought about the lifetime of that sand. I envisioned it from its rocky beginnings as a boulder somewhere far away and long ago, to its breakdown in cobbles, to its further breakdown into pebbles, then to its further breakdown into coarse sand, then to its further break”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Kissing her was like talking to her. There was that same sense of effortless compatibility.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“It had become my opinion that the unenlightened were unenlightened for a reason and that while the unexamined life may not be worth living, according to Socrates, at least it might make survival desirable.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“My particular brand of anxiety often sought to corrupt the innocence of the everyday into the delinquency of my daydreams.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Reading that book is like looking at the final EKG results of a man who died a long, long time ago. Each word reads like the rapid peaks and falls of his arrhythmic imagination; each sentence steering him toward the stroke of genius that will eventually cause his mind to flatline.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“In the daily war I've waged against myself, my lover has been twice my ally and therefore twice my enemy.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“About the author: Sean Michael Norris believes that this book serves as a sort of autobiography. Despite the fact that this story is a fictional product of his imagination, he feels that it represents a true portrait of his experience — that it honestly depicts how a younger, more vulnerable version of himself saw the world. And if he’s right about that, then to read this book is to learn about its author at a deeper level than any list of biographical facts could ever enable you to reach.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“The distance between significance and irrelevance is shorter than you think. It could be traveled in a single day, a single moment, or even a single word.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“When the source of all my meaning came to die, so did the meaning of death.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“This all makes me think about how often blessings are just burdens in disguise. It reminds me of how gifts always come at a cost — how everything great is terrible.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“The privilege of protection is often perceived as power. Those who are protected often tend to assume that they’re strong. That’s true for immature children who have known nothing but the over-protection of their parents. That’s true for ungrateful citizens who have experienced nothing but the safety provided by their governing state. And that’s true for unchallenged, complacent bartenders who have grown accustomed to the protections of a simple, uncomplicated life.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“As I saw it, the needle in my arm that carried the ink left a word to serve as a metaphorical needle; preventing my ego from ever over-inflating.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Writers only come to know explicitly what every man who has ever had to be a man understands implicitly. That life is complicated. That you should try to help others when you can. That you shouldn’t contribute to anyone’s suffering. That death is inevitable. That the only true wisdom lies in knowing how useless your wisdom is.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“When I read, I read desperately because I was desperate — desperate to exchange my own anxious thoughts for the calming thoughts of the book’s narrator. I read like that so, for the length of each book, I could be transported out of my body, out of my mind, and into another world — a world where I didn’t have to be me.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“The version of me who read the book felt incredibly sad for the version of me who wrote it.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“When I was a kid, I heard a story about half of all marriages end in divorce. At that time, it was a story about my parents. Twenty years later, I heard the same story — that half of all marriages end in divorce. Then, it was a story about my wife and I. Today, I heard the same story again — that half of all marriages end in divorce. Now, it’s a story about my kids. I heard that same exact story three times — the same exact words — but each time I heard it, it was a completely different story. It changed because I changed.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“The light from behind her father’s eyes resembled not so much the dimness of time but rather a sort of eclipse. It was almost as if he was two men trapped in one body and that the bigger, brighter, star of a man he used to be had become eclipsed by this small, sturdy, rock of a man that sat before me. His every glance seemed to be warning me - shouting at me - that to live the life of a modern man is to live a life eclipsed.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes