Quotes from Charles Frazier

And she [Ada] thought momentarily that she ought to worry about losing her beauty, about having become brown and stringy and rough. 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.

Ada wondered about his hundreds of tunes. Where were they now and where might they go if he died.

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

When Ada disappeared into the trees, it was like a part of the richness of the world had gone with her. 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.

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.

Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.

So, a little morphine, a good sweat, and a bowel movement—the cure for everything that ails you.

If every generation helps the next take one step up, imagine where we might all be someday.

Whether you pick well or poorly, the act of choosing carries grief. Leaves you wondering, years later, what life might have been had you chosen differently. . . . Or even wishing you'd simply paused, taken a long, deep breath. Not allowed the personal moment and the pattern of your family and your stupid culture to shove you two-handed from behind, forcing you to stumble unbalanced into the future

V has finally learned that sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice. And even when it's not, those around you become uncomfortable because they think you are wise.

Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?

They did not talk much while they ate, other than for Ada to say that the Georgia boy did not seem like much of a one as far as men went. Ruby said she found him not particularly worse than the general order of men, which is to say that he would greatly benefit from having someone's foot in his back every waking minute.

I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She's still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she'll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope. She sees me and backs away in horror while I try to explain why I made the choices I made.

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.

Going bearded seemed one less thing to have to fail at.

A deep belief that your moment in time is the pinnacle, the only standard of judgment extending from the creation of light until the black apocalypse, that what you believe right now is eternal truth because you believe it so fervently—those deep beliefs so crucial at the moment but none of them more permanent than a puff of air across a palmful of dry talcum.

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.

Magic singers proclaiming hope and despair in the dark.

Lily's spirit neediness expressed itself raw as a kerosene blaze in the material world.

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.

When Luce did look in the mirror, she thought she might still be sort of pretty, if you went by what most people thought was pretty. And if that's the way you went, you had your own problems. It wasn't like being pretty was an accomplishment, and it would go away in time. So it would be a mistake to get too hung up on it.

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.

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.

In Ruby's mind, everything […] fell under the rule of the heavens. […] They were, as Ada saw them an expression of stewardship, a means of taking care, a discipline. They provide a ritual of concern for the patterns and tendencies of the material world where it might be seen to intersect with some other world.