Quotes from Charles Frazier

Her need to shape memory into history.

Blood covered his face and dirt had gummed to it, so that his visage was ocher in color and appeared like a clay sculpture illustrating some earlier phase of mankind when facial features were yet provisional.

He picked out a little twenty-dollar gold piece

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.

I do know that however hard you try, you can't see the inside tangle of somebody else's love—or whatever uglier word applies—not deep enough to make sense of it.

History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic. People suffer and die in ignorance and delusion.

great loss wasn't that simple. You couldn't just wish yourself out of it. You had to go through it all the way, had to let grief roll over you like Mississippi floodwater until it decided to let you rise to the surface and keep going, more beaten and broken than before.

It was simple, and not one she'd ever found the strength to follow. The idea was, the you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are. And also maybe something about the great reluctance with which we let go of our belief in a just God.

Inhuman, V says. But that's an easy word. We've been doing that sort of thing to each other all through history, back past the Pyramids. Humans are inhuman, whether it's by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.

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.

so all you can hear is just general leaves?

To Ada, though, it seemed akin to miracle that Stobrod, of all people, should offer himself up as proof positive that no matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.

But by fusing the best of both sides, a kind of intertwining consciousness arises—grandmother and granddaughter wisdom emerging from shared hope, relieved of emotions tainted by control and guilt and anger.

I don't even know whether past feelings and memories deserve any respect at all. Maybe they're no more important than a pinch of pain from an injury decades old. Feelings and memories rise and pass every day, like the weather. Only important at the moment. Why not just notice them and let them go?

Their moral position in converting from slave holders to champions of freedom was about like a house cat on a cold night scooting through a closing door just before the latch clacks shut. But sometimes timing is all. A brief moment of history, less than a deep breath, becomes the difference between inside and outside.

Luce, sitting near the back, all of this new to her, likes to believe her children are nothing like a pair of copperheads amid a field of sweet brown mice.

It is a frightful thing to drop out of one's place in the world and never find it again. I try very hard to keep my memory green and thus by sympathy live anew, or if not anew, aright, which is more to the point, much more.

Taking the life of a nation is a serious task, V says. Few succeed, even if the cause is just. We didn't, and ours wasn't. But sometimes I can't help missing those days when we all just took care of each other.

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.

When time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.

It does your mind good to talk to people different from you.

Like Dolores and Frank might quit being little glum reavers out to wreck their world.

sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice.

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.