Quotes from Charles Frazier

Earth has not anything to show more fair. Dull would be the soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty.

If you mean slaves, you only remember what they allowed you to remember. Even if Davis Bend was really as humane as you believe, they kept their misery to themselves, kept it a mystery to you. I promise that's true. Think of it as a great gift, a mark of affection. Their protection of your memory.

had that to understand each other by, though otherwise they could not have been more alien to each other. In short

Had she been an old woman who long ago in her youth sang beautifully, one might have said that she had learned to use the diminished nature of her voice to maximum effect, that it was a lesson in how to live with damage, how to make peace with it and use it for what it can do. But she was not an old woman.

Miss Howell, I worry that the pains your father has taken to educate you will result in little but finding himself with a wit on his hands.

Words, when they've been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they've passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin strippd from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless.

So, standing here looking at you, all grown up, the question I ask is simple. In the long run, how different is a goddam hot dog from a Vienna sausage?

His best talent had yet to be determined, unless you counted unrealized potential.

many of Bear's stories and comments shared a general drift. They advised against fearing all of creation. But not because it is always benign, for it is not. It will, with certainty, consume us all. We are made to be destroyed. We are kindling for the fire, and our lives will stand as naught against the onrush of time. Bear's position, if I understood it, was that refusal to fear these general terms of existence is an honorable act of defiance.

We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people.

From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and howls. Nevertheless the beautiful and familiar tune was impervious to poor performance, and Inman thought how painfully young it sounded, as if the pattern of its notes allowed no room to imagine a future clouded and tangled and diminished.

The main thing, Ruby said, was not to get ahead of yourself. Go at a rhythm that could be sustained on and on. Do just as much as you could do and still be able to get up and do again tomorrow. No more, and no less.

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

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.

To him, the world had no order of succession, no causation, no precedent. Everything he saw was new-minted, and thus every day was a parade of wonders.

How would you ever come to know God's name for that star? – You wouldn't, He holds it close, the boy said. It's a thing you'll never know. It's a lesson that sometimes we're meant to settle for ignorance. Right there's what mostly comes of knowledge [boy tips his chin at the battlefield]

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.

Inman felt like God's most marauded bantling.

WILDE SAID, I hoped he could offer advice on ways Ireland might free itself. He has been the greatest revolutionary of the past century. —He was never a rebel. He was a businessman and a politician who believed the Constitution protected the capital of his class and culture above everything else.

There in the highlands, clear weather held for much of the time. The air lacked its usual haze, and the view stretched on and on across rows of blue mountains, each paler than the last until the final ranks were indistinguishable from the sky. It was as if all the world might be composed of nothing but valley and ridge.

The father let his rifle down and stood its butt against the porch boards. The boy, though, kept alert. There was a good deal of killer about him, and it was why he still lived. The last four years had made a whole generation of young boys -- who ought to have been going to school and learning a trade and thrilling deep in their bones just to dance with a girl and peck her on the cheek -- into slit-eyed killers with no more tell of emotion than an old riverboat faro gambler.

Head full of sorrows, heart full of dreams. How to maintain the latter as life progresses? How not to let the first cancel the second?

our inner selves can't help but come along

History reveals a person's deeds—their outward character but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life rounded by a dream—unpenetrated, unguessed.