Anna and I did not make love. I don't remember why. Maybe we didn't need to. She might have been afraid, although I doubt she was afraid of much. She'd been a midwife before she opened a studio; she'd held life in her hands, like a wire from a galvanic cell. Maybe death was too strong in me for an act so inspirited with life. Although I sometimes think that death is what gives lovemaking its desperate and terrible joy.

— Norman Lock

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 Custer's' pack of eighty dogs; with his junior officers, planning the destruction of the Lakota Sioux; with Liable in the parlor of their quarters at the fort; and the general striking a pose that would become as recognizable as Napoleon's; arms folded across his chest, looking forward and slightly upward at his magnificent destiny.

— Norman Lock

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.

— Norman Lock

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!

— Norman Lock

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

— Norman Lock

Hatred is unattractive, but it's also irresistible. If men were honest with themselves, they'd admit it's a stronger passion than lust.

— Norman Lock

I hammered on the Poe's' 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.

— Norman Lock

I insist on caprice as a necessary countermeasure to slavery. Otherwise, my own dictatorial mind must take -- unknown to me -- its instructions from a mastermind.

— Norman Lock

I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.

— Norman Lock

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.

— Norman Lock