He knows change doesn't happen overnight - he's all too aware that he's skirting the edges of hypocrisy and has to be careful how he words his encouragement. He thought he was turning over new leaves, himself, after all, before all of this happened.

At first he thinks Quentin is just referring to bad luck, and the monthly chaos that comes and goes between banks of fog. But then he remembers what Peter had told him about his world, about the way half of humanity had simply ... ceased to exist. It wasn't any poor choice or circumstance that had caused Quentin to lose so many people he cared about, Norman realized: they were taken from him by a mad creature with more power than anyone or anything should have even been allowed. It brought him up short: how was he supposed to even respond to that, to one more thing he had no experience with and no business offering his thoughts on?

He folds his hands on the table, looks down at them so that he isn't staring at Quentin while he thinks. Beside him, one of the ice cubes in his glass settles with a soft clink, like a punctuation mark as his mind shifts gears and comes up with something.

"You're an engineer, right? ... If things keep breaking ... what project are you going to move on to from there?"

In other words: what was he going to do now, if not try to connect?