214 Quotes by Charles Frazier

I met people when we lived down in Raleigh who’d ask where I grew up, and I’d say about two hours west of Asheville, and they’d say they didn’t know there was any North Carolina two hours west of Asheville. It was in many ways an isolated place.

V drifts into talking about generations. How grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation – twenty-five years at least – and the anger in both directions dissipates. All the failed expectations and betrayals become cleansed by an intervention of time. Resentment and bitter need for retribution fall away. Love becomes the operative emotion.

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.

Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don’t just survive. Celebrate.

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.

It is best not to study too much on who gets what they deserve. It can lead to an overly complicated interpretation of God’s personal attributes.

Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light 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 – every 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.

So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life – joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss – from fire into smoke rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.

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.