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Heaven and Hurricanes

Book by Sean Norris · 38 quotes · Love, Reading, Writing

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Heaven and Hurricanes Quotes

“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“That’s the funny thing about stories — like all living things, they need to adapt and evolve in order to survive in their environment. Consider for a second that you can drop the same exact species into ten different ecosystems and within a few dozen generations, they could be hardly recognizable from their original form or to each other. The same is true for stories. They mutate to fit the cognitive conditions of each person’s specific mental habitat. That’s why a group of people can experience the same exact event, and within a decade or two, the story of that event can be wildly different as told by each person who experienced it.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“No matter how much I loved the idea of a book set in Key West, the reality of it never did anything but disappoint me. Maybe alexithymia was to blame. Maybe it was the writer’s lack of talent. Maybe it was the inebriant nature or ephemeral essence of Key West living. Maybe it was all of those things. Maybe it was none of them. It didn’t matter. It was my opinion that no story set in Key West has ever, or will ever, do the island justice.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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