214 Quotes by Charles Frazier

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.

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.

If I had to give up reading or give up listening to music, I suspect I’d stick with the music.

Our minds aren’t made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It’s a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us.

In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless, he wondered why the white people were not better than they are, having had it for so long. He promised that just as soon as white people achieved Christianity, he would recommend it to his own folks.

There was nothing about her story remarkable other than that it was her life.

It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond to.

Nothing changes what alreaday happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don’t.

Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay. A puff of breath, a moment’s lost attention, and it’s all gone, crashed to ruination, shards in the dirt. Then mankind retreats to the caves, leaving little behind but obelisks weathering to nubs like broken teeth, dissolving to beach sand.