Top 100 Charles Frazier Quotes
#1. The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom.
Charles Frazier
#2. And all the ministers of the various types of local Baptists had declined to participate in retribution for Monroe's failure to believe in a God with severe limitations on His patience and mercy.
Charles Frazier
#3. Publishers give you deadlines for those last phases of production that are perfectly comfortable for them. So, to whatever extent I can, I like to push those to give me a little more time, and make it so that they're as uncomfortable as I am.
Charles Frazier
#4. 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.
Charles Frazier
#5. It's a good thing war is so terrible or else we'd get to liking it too much.
Charles Frazier
#6. If she had not been alone, she would never have seen the panther or felt the hope it spread into the world like rings around the splash of a rock thrown into a still lake.
Charles Frazier
#7. I was 46 when 'Cold Mountain' came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm.
Charles Frazier
#8. People don't change, Lola said. Maybe you're still young enough to pretend that's not true. People are who they are, and everybody around them has to take it or go somewhere else.
Charles Frazier
#9. That's the way it is at some point in life. An inevitable consequence of living. A lot of things begin falling away.
Charles Frazier
#10. After she had licked the last white drop of the ice cream, she reached out her cone to Mrs. McKennet and said, Here's your little horn back.
Charles Frazier
#11. If you're not who you want to be, at least act like who you want it be. - Bud
Charles Frazier
#12. The flame of urgent coupling burned hottest against the woman, no matter how romantic and high and heartsick the anguish of the man might be pitched in retrospect.
Charles Frazier
#13. And also forever too late for Lily to learn that raging passion predicts nothing but a mess of bad news for everybody.
Charles Frazier
#14. Days of yore when America was no more than a strip of land stretching a couple hundred miles west of the Atlantic and the rest was just a very compelling idea.
Charles Frazier
#15. I won't go into it any further, other than to say that year by year the world darkens down and things are always going away.
Charles Frazier
#17. 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.
Charles Frazier
#18. Magic singers proclaiming hope and despair in the dark.
Charles Frazier
#19. His spells portrayed the spirit as a frail thing, contstantly under attack and in need of stength, always threatening to die inside you. Inman found this notion dismal indeed, since he had been taught by sermon and hymn to hold as truth that the soul of man never dies.
Charles Frazier
#20. Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace.
Charles Frazier
#21. 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.
Charles Frazier
#22. 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.
Charles Frazier
#23. I had never taken creative writing classes. Hadn't even considered it.
Charles Frazier
#24. If I had to give up reading or give up listening to music, I suspect I'd stick with the music.
Charles Frazier
#25. You try your best to love the world despite obvious flaws in design and execution and you take care of whatever needy things present themselves to you during your passage through it. Otherwise you're worthless.
Charles Frazier
#26. So she guessed you could word hard to make yourself who you wanted to be and yet find that the passing years had transformed you beyond your own recognition. End up disappointed in yourself, despite your best efforts.
Charles Frazier
#27. 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
Charles Frazier
#28. 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?
Charles Frazier
#29. 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.
Charles Frazier
#31. Had that to understand each other by, though otherwise they could not have been more alien to each other. In short
Charles Frazier
#32. He is so full of manure, that man, we could lay him in the dirt and grow another one just like him." Ruby about her dad in "Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier
#33. 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.
Charles Frazier
#34. Back then, he'd have to leave at the end of August for the start of school, so the week before Labor Day became it's own tiny season of gloom, like a hundred Sunday nights crowded together.
Charles Frazier
#35. 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.
Charles Frazier
#36. They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!
Charles Frazier
#37. Than appreciating the calm voice of Charleston during an evening walk along the Battery with Fort Sumter off in the distance, the great white houses at one's back, palmettos rattling their leaves in a sea breeze.
Charles Frazier
#38. 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.
Charles Frazier
#39. Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.
Charles Frazier
#40. But one day leads to another, and so on. No way around it. It's that merciless thing that time does.
Charles Frazier
#41. 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.
Charles Frazier
#42. Lola's only nugget of wisdom to her little daughters was Never cry, never ever.
Charles Frazier
#44. For you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're only left with your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not.
Charles Frazier
#45. A distressingly large portion of the world doesn't do you any good whatsoever.
Charles Frazier
#46. The man had asked, Why do you want sheep? The wool? Meat? Monroe's answer had been, For the atmosphere.
Charles Frazier
#47. They did what they did, and moved forward despite whatever trail of ashes they left behind.
Charles Frazier
#48. He saw with sorrow that hers was a life he could step right into and keep working at hard from tonight until death. If he allowed himself to ponder it for a minute, he saw all the world hanging over the girl like the deadfall to a trap, ready to drop and crush.
Charles Frazier
#49. But she knew the black hole pulled at you. You stand up to it, or you go down.
Charles Frazier
#50. He said, I've been coming for you on a hard road. I'm never letting you go. Never.
Charles Frazier
#51. 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.
Charles Frazier
#52. The horror is other people. The things they think up to do to you.
Charles Frazier
#53. People who are isolated interest me, whether they isolate themselves or have been isolated by circumstances.
Charles Frazier
#54. I've lived out West some ... I've always liked the High Plains areas - eastern Colorado, eastern Wyoming, western Nebraska.
Charles Frazier
#55. Needing and getting don't seem likely to match up any time soon ... What needs doing is mine to do.
Charles Frazier
#56. 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.
Charles Frazier
#57. We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical
Charles Frazier
#58. In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless, he wondered why the white people were not better than they are, having had it for so long. He promised that just as soon as white people achieved Christianity, he would recommend it to his own folks.
Charles Frazier
#59. 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.
Charles Frazier
#60. But God in his infinite wisdome had apparently thought it was an entertaining idea for us to always be wanting to get up in one another.
Charles Frazier
#61. He floated along thinking he would like to love the world as it was, and he felt a great deal of accomplishment for the occasions when he did, since the other was so easy.
Charles Frazier
#62. Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
Charles Frazier
#63. Lily's spirit neediness expressed itself raw as a kerosene blaze in the material world.
Charles Frazier
#64. 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.
Charles Frazier
#65. Most of the travel was purposeless, carried out in exactly the desperate spirit of fleeing from pursuers. It was romantic, in a certain sense. Especially if you're not the one doing it.
Charles Frazier
#67. The path to contentment was to abide by one's own nature and follow it's path.
Charles Frazier
#68. Like Dolores and Frank might quit being little glum reavers out to wreck their world.
Charles Frazier
#69. Nothing changes what alreaday happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.
Charles Frazier
#70. Going bearded seemed one less thing to have to fail at.
Charles Frazier
#71. If I had a brother in jail and one in Georgia, I'd try to bust the one out of Georgia first.
Charles Frazier
#72. Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don't just survive. Celebrate.
Charles Frazier
#73. ...I had always believed prayer ought to be conducted on our feet rather than on our knees, since God seems in all other departments of life to require us to stand upright and account for ourselves.
Charles Frazier
#74. Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent.
Charles Frazier
#75. 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?
Charles Frazier
#76. Among themselves, they had figured out how to go about marriage so as to accomplish the least damage. t The husbands lived two hours away...
Charles Frazier
#77. 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.
Charles Frazier
#78. 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.
Charles Frazier
#79. It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond to.
Charles Frazier
#80. By way of conclusion, Luce said, I lived through it [the rape], so if you can't stand to hear it, you can take me home and go to hell. Men get so damn strange sometimes.
Charles Frazier
#81. In her heart, though, she wondered, Is anything remembered forever?
Charles Frazier
#82. 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.
Charles Frazier
#83. Monroe had in fact preached that God was not at all such a one as ourselves, not one to be temperamentally inclined to tread ragefully upon us until our blood flew up and stained all His white raiment, but rather that He looked on both the best and worst of mankind with weary, bemused pity.
Charles Frazier
#84. I met people when we lived down in Raleigh who'd ask where I grew up, and I'd say about two hours west of Asheville, and they'd say they didn't know there was any North Carolina two hours west of Asheville. It was in many ways an isolated place.
Charles Frazier
#85. Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.
Charles Frazier
#86. She always carried a book, though, in case she needed to read a few pages to avoid unwanted conversation.
Charles Frazier
#87. It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.
Charles Frazier
#88. Like when the counselor delved into your habits of using a public toilet, such as do you flush with your foot and use your elbow to open the door? If yes, woe unto you. You're crazy.
Charles Frazier
#89. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.
Charles Frazier
#90. Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots.
Charles Frazier
#91. [No] matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.
Charles Frazier
#93. 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.
Charles Frazier
#95. As was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained.
Charles Frazier
#96. In the hovering between sleep and wakefulness, lucid but dreaming, Luce's mind got away from her, and all kinds of empty shit she had meant to put entirely behind her forever swam up and lived in her head again.
Charles Frazier
#97. 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.
Charles Frazier
#98. 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.
Charles Frazier
#99. He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.
Charles Frazier
#100. We are not strong enough to stand up against endless grief, And yet pain is the constant drone of life. So if we are to have any happiness at all, it is only in the passing instant.
Charles Frazier
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