Quotes from Charles Frazier

Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past have 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. A simple enough lesson, yet hard for Luce to learn. She couldn't

Humans are inhuman, whether it's by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.

Children rediscover their parents wisdom when they finally become adults themselves.

We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed our past life like a pair of wet and muddy trousers, just roll their heavy clinging fabric down our legs and step away. We also reach a point where we would give the rest of our withering days for the month of July in our seventeenth year. But no thread of Ariadne exists to lead us back there.

How embarrassing that she ever did something that silly. But, good God, she was seventeen. At that age, we're mostly high-pitched and crazy. All urgent chemicals raging around the blood course. And that's why we do dangerous and embarrassing things, as if simultaneously we're immortal and going to die tomorrow. And that's why we look back on that time so fondly from the dimmer years to come. Remembering the days when we were like Greek gods. Mighty and idiotic.

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.

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.

Never acknowledging that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous.

The instant passed so fast, and when that happens, it goes for good and all you have is a slow lifetime to speculate on revisions. Except time flows one way and drags us with it no matter how hard we paddle upstream.

I don't know facts, and probably there aren't any to know. Whatever crazy thing people want to believe, that's what they call it, a fact.

Remembering doesn't change anything—it will always have happened. But forgetting won't erase it either.

Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619.

No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past have 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.

We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed

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.

a heavy croker sack hanging pendant from a chestnut limb.

That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen.

I wonder what people talk about who've destroyed their lives with addictions other than books and politics and money and war.

Mostly the colors of that land stuck to shades of red dirt and black cinders with a few dashes of sickly green. And yet look up, and the sun burned yellow and the sky rolled blue and deep like an argument that the world had not gone wrong at all.

Those teachings had been burned away. But he could not abide by a universe composed only of what he could see, especially when it was so frequently foul.

How very sad anniversaries become. They are for the young and hopeful and for the very old and hopeless. A spark of expectation reveals the gloomy, weary waste.

He had long since decided there was little usefulness in speculating much on what a day will bring. It led a person to the equal errors of being either dreadful or hopeful. Neither, in his experience, served to ease your mind.

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.

Lola's only nugget of wisdom to her little daughters was Never cry, never ever.