Norman Lock Quotes

For all my wanderings, I'm ordinary. I came to terms long ago with my littleness. A man is what he is--he can't rise so much as an inch above his shortcomings--Horatio Alger be damned!

At his request--a Custer request was a command impossible to refuse--I produced a series of prints for the Centennial Expedition at Philadelphia: the general with Bloody Knife, his favorite Indian scout; with the Custers' pack of eighty dogs; with his junior officers, planning the destruction of the Lakota Sioux; with Libbie in the parlor of their quarters at the fort; and the general striking a pose that would become as recognizable as Napoléon's; arms folded across his chest, looking forward and slightly upward at his magnificent destiny.

Talking of appearances, I would like my future readers to know that the picture of Jim and me that Thomas Hart Benton painted on the wall of the Missouri state capitol bears not the slightest resemblance to either one of us. ... I've never been satisfied with any representation of myself and have seen only one picture of Jim that did him justice. I don't know why this should be, unless it is evidence of a nearly universal prejudice against us, instigated by Sunday school superintendents, Republicans, and bigots.

Forgive me,' Poe repeated earnestly.I nodded coldly. I was not above acting like a child; I was hardly more tha

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.

While my father was out boozing, she'd read to me by the stub of a candle, a thread of soot twisting upwards from its pinched, meager flame. By her voice alone, she could raise up the old stories from the bones of their words and--lilting between shades of comedy and melodrama--turn the dreary space around me into a stage for my wildest imaginings.

Even now, when I have time to consider what I've been and what I am, I doubt I comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of life. I might as well be a meteor of a man, for all the difference I've made on earth.

To ennoble is to diminish by robbing people of their complexity, their completeness, of their humanity, which is always clouded by what gets stirred up at the bottom.