Quotes from Charles Frazier

But Luce takes the attitude, when you start fretting the day-by- day you lose track of the long view. And the long view is, they need to learn to speak for themselves and do the best they can. For now, if they bag their own lunch and it's pickles and prunes and they say the words, all you do is put both thumbs up and say, Good job.

I've had relatives so crooked they nearly went to prison, but if you have money you never actually go. They make you think it for a while, and that's your punishment.

Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots.

Among themselves, they had figured out how to go about marriage so as to accomplish the least damage. t The husbands lived two hours away...

Among themselves, they had figured out how to go about marriage so as to accomplish the least damage. The husbands lived two hours away...

In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless

So even very young she saw slavery as an ancient practice arising because rich people would rather not do hard work, and also from the tendency of people to clench hard to advantageous passages in the Bible and dismiss the rest.

He liked brown antiquated travel books describing trips that weren't possible anymore - explorations of the Western Hemisphere back when much of it was still unmapped.

sitting in front of the Golden Gate made me think that if we, meaning our culture, could make this bridge-sculpture right now, bad off and broke as we were, then surely we could do almost anything, and we could do it gracefully, powerfully, beautifully, and functionally.

In her heart, though, she wondered, Is anything remembered forever?

That's the way it is at some point in life. An inevitable consequence of living. A lot of things begin falling away.

Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent.

The children quivered and drew the quilt up to their noses, and Luce could feel them squirming towards her, their feet reaching under the covers to touch her hip where she sat on the edge of the bed. When the big goat laid the troll low, they drew a deep breath and let it out slow. By the third night, she had them joining her to shout the final lines. Snip, snap, snout. This tale's told out.

She sipped Scotch considerably older than she was, the taste of time in its passing, in harmony with the outer world, where poplars were already half bare and long grasses drooped burnt from the first frost. The call of an evening bird, and the sun low. Bands of lavender and slate clouds moving against a metallic sky, denoting the passage of autumn. Fallen leaves blown onto the porch. The planet racking around again toward winter.

declaration about freedom in the other. And then an outlaw sticks a pistol in his face and says give me one or the other. Every time—ten out of ten—he'll hug the sack and throw away the ideals. Because the sack's what's behind the ideals, like the foundation under a building. And that's how freedom and chains and a whipping post can live alongside each other comfortably.

Because, like so many of them, he held no beloved idea or philosophy as tightly as his money purse. Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light

wonders of domination can be accomplished by the overwhelming and single-minded application of force

The flame of urgent coupling burned hottest against the woman, no matter how romantic and high and heartsick the anguish of the man might be pitched in retrospect.

You can mire yourself in the past, but you can't change a damn thing in that lost world.

She'd said one night, I don't think about the past much. I try to take each day as it presents itself and let sleep put it away before the next sunrise.

She draws a long deep breath and hums a bit of "Sunflower Slow Drag," her fingers twitching to press imaginary keys. Soon she falls asleep.

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.

I was 46 when 'Cold Mountain' came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm.

I've always thought Harper Lee might have made a great decision. Much as you'd like to have more books by her, there's something about just one that's kind of mysterious and nice. On the other hand, the New York gossip about me was that I'd never write another book. So I thought, 'Well, I will then.'