Best 99 quotes of Charles Frazier on MyQuotes

A lizard in the spring - hear his darling sing. A bird with wings to fly - go back to his darling weep and moan till he dies. A mole in the ground - root a mountain down.

All I can say is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren.

And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now.

Ask her what she craved, and she'd get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom.

Ask her what she craved, and she'd get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.

But I believe the words entered me and changed me and still work in me. The words eat me and sustain me. And when I'm dead and in a box in the dark dark ground, and all my various souls have died and I am nothing but insensible bones, something in the marrow will still feel yearning, desire persisting beyond flesh.

But she couldn't dismiss easily his light touch with her. No pushing or pressing, none of that herding and corralling bullshit, unlike any of her old boyfriends. And maybe who you fell for and who you eventually loved wasn't rational, no matter how hard you tried to list pros and cons and sum the results. You couldn't think your way through it, not all the way. Maybe just the scent of somebody carried more weight than everything else put together.

Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don't just survive. Celebrate.

Contentment is mostly a matter of talking yourself into believing that God will not strike you too hard for leaning in the direction of your hungers.

Disease is nature's revenge for our destructiveness.

From my childhood, I remember a tiny old woman named Mary, made pale and almost translucent by time. Mary's childhood memories extended back to the confusing and violent finale of the Civil War, and she told stories of brutal murders in those days and refused to name some of the killers, as if dead men might still be prosecuted in the late 1950s.

He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better.

He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been burned out of him but he was yet walking.

I do the same things I did when I was 12 years old: I ride bikes, I read books, I walk in the woods. And I listen to music.

If I had to give up reading or give up listening to music, I suspect I'd stick with the music.

I had never taken creative writing classes. Hadn't even considered it.

I know I don't need him, but I think I want him.

I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear...And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter." "I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't see why not you." "Why not me?

I remember my father checking on a mountain kid who hadn't been coming to school. My father had this beautiful Harris tweed overcoat. He came back with a knife cut all down one side. The parents had told him it was none of his business why their son wasn't going to school.

It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond to

It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.

It is best not to study too much on who gets what they deserve. It can lead to an overly complicated interpretation of God's personal attributes.

I've always thought Harper Lee might have made a great decision. Much as you'd like to have more books by her, there's something about just one that's kind of mysterious and nice. On the other hand, the New York gossip about me was that I'd never write another book. So I thought, 'Well, I will then.

I've lived out West some... I've always liked the High Plains areas - eastern Colorado, eastern Wyoming, western Nebraska.

I've never been very attached to genre labels and never set out intentionally to write historic fiction. Besides, what you consider historic depends on how far back your memory extends.

I was 46 when 'Cold Mountain' came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm.

Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn't change them. most of the time, they couldn't change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance.

Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.

My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.

No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past having nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.

One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of Creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift, but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument that life did not just happen.

One time at the University of Colorado, at a faculty dinner, this professor said to me, 'Well, my goodness, a boy from Appa-lay-chee-a with a Ph.D!' The dinner was in her house. And I said, 'My grandparents didn't have indoor plumbing, but they had more books in their house than you do.' I was a little insulted by the Appa-lay-chee-a business.

Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consciousness, we call our response sacred.

Our worst pain is confined within our own skin.

People who are isolated interest me, whether they isolate themselves or have been isolated by circumstances.

She always carried a book, though, in case she needed to read a few pages to avoid unwanted conversation.

...she knew in her heart that nature has a preference for a particular order: parents die, then children die. But it was a harsh design, offering little relief from pain, for being in accord with it means that the fortunate find themselves orphaned.

So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life - joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss - from fire into smoke rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.

Surely it is a sin to reject the few gifts we are given. Be happy in the flash of time granted to us or hurt forever.

That's just pain she said. It goes eventually. And when it's gone, there's no lasting memory. Not the worst of it anyway. It fades. Our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It's a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us.

That's not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn't suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on

The past is a stronger influence in the South. But I think everywhere you have this sense that the world changes faster than you can accommodate yourself to. Looking back and seeing how you got where you are is a useful way to combat disorientation.

There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.

The Sixties were different in an isolated place. We got two television channels if the wind was blowing in the right direction. The radio stations went off at sundown. Then you picked up Chicago and heard the teenage music you really yearned for.

Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.

Verbs. All of them tiring.

Well, I'm a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not.

We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical

What I'm certain I don't want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.

What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?