Quotes from Charles Frazier

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.

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.

With the snow piling up outside, the warm dry cabin hidden in its fold of the mountain felt like a safe haven indeed, though it had not been such for the people who had lived there. Soldiers had found them and made the cabin trailhead to a path of exile, loss, and death. But for a while that night, it was a place that held within its walls no pain nor even a vague memory collection of pain.

You'll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you've been all along.

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.

The horror is other people. The things they think up to do to you.

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.

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.

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.

When all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. Only desire trumps time.

The window apparently wanted only to take his thoughts back. Which was fine with him, for he had seen the metal face of the age and had been so stunned by it that when he thought into the future, all he could vision was a world from which everything he had counted important had been banished or had willingly fled.

the you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are.

There was nothing about her story remarkable other than that it was her life.

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.

a man's spirit could be torn apart and cease and yet his body keep on living...His spirit blasted away so that he had become lonesome and estranged from all around him...It seemed a poor swap to find that the only way one might keep from fearing death was to act numb and set apart as if dead already.

But one day leads to another, and so on. No way around it. It's that merciless thing that time does.

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

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.

Children don't judge their own lives. Normal for them is what's laid before them day by day. Judgment comes later.

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.

One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held more for him than 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 against the notion that things just happen.

They did what they did, and moved forward despite whatever trail of ashes they left behind.

But she knew the black hole pulled at you. You stand up to it, or you go down.

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.