Top 150 Charles Frazier Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Disease is nature’s revenge for our destructiveness.”

— Charles Frazier

2. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

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

— Charles Frazier

4. “She always carried a book, though, in case she needed to read a few pages to avoid unwanted conversation.”

— Charles Frazier

5. “He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better.”

— Charles Frazier

6. “What you have lost will not be returned to you; it always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on, or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you.”

— Charles Frazier

7. “When all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. Only desire trumps time.”

— Charles Frazier

8. “That’s just pain she said. It goes eventually. And when it’s gone, there’s no lasting memory. Not the worst of it anyway. It fades. 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.”

— Charles Frazier

9. “Verbs. All of them tiring.”

— Charles Frazier

10. “I know I don’t need him, but I think I want him.”

— Charles Frazier

11. “Writing doesn’t come real easy to me. I couldn’t write a novel in a year. It wouldn’t be readable. I don’t let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.”

— Charles Frazier

12. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

13. “My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.”

— Charles Frazier

14. “Well, I’m a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I’d love to be more efficient, but I am not.”

— Charles Frazier

15. “Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it’s a common mistake nonetheless.”

— Charles Frazier

16. “What I’m certain I don’t want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I’d had more nerve.”

— Charles Frazier

17. “We are not strong enough to stand up against endless grief, And yet pain is the constant drone of life. So if we are to have any happiness at all, it is only in the passing instant.”

— Charles Frazier

Featured in: Strong Quotes

18. “He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.”

— Charles Frazier

19. “We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical.”

— Charles Frazier

20. “I was 46 when ‘Cold Mountain’ came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm.”

— Charles Frazier

21. “Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.”

— Charles Frazier

22. “It’s a good thing war is so terrible or else we’d get to liking it too much.”

— Charles Frazier

23. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

24. “That’s not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn’t suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on.”

— Charles Frazier

25. “He floated along thinking he would like to love the world as it was, and he felt a great deal of accomplishment for the occasions when he did, since the other was so easy.”

— Charles Frazier

26. “All I can say is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren.”

— Charles Frazier

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

— Charles Frazier

28. “A lizard in the spring – hear his darling sing. A bird with wings to fly – go back to his darling weep and moan till he dies. A mole in the ground – root a mountain down.”

— Charles Frazier

29. “Never acknowledging that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous.”

— Charles Frazier

30. “People who are isolated interest me, whether they isolate themselves or have been isolated by circumstances.”

— Charles Frazier

31. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

32. “I do the same things I did when I was 12 years old: I ride bikes, I read books, I walk in the woods. And I listen to music.”

— Charles Frazier

33. “I don’t know facts, and probably there aren’t any to know. Whatever crazy thing people want to believe, that’s what they call it, a fact.”

— Charles Frazier

34. “What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?”

— Charles Frazier

35. “There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.”

— Charles Frazier

36. “Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn’t change them. most of the time, they couldn’t change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance.”

— Charles Frazier

37. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

38. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

39. “She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.”

— Charles Frazier

40. “No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past having nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don’t.”

— Charles Frazier

41. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

42. “I had never taken creative writing classes. Hadn’t even considered it.”

— Charles Frazier

43. “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. Except time flows one way and drags us with it no matter how hard we paddle upstream.”

— Charles Frazier

44. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

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

— Charles Frazier

Featured in: Reading Quotes

46. “Surely it is a sin to reject the few gifts we are given. Be happy in the flash of time granted to us or hurt forever.”

— Charles Frazier

47. “Children don’t judge their own lives. Normal for them is what’s laid before them day by day. Judgment comes later.”

— Charles Frazier

48. “I remember my father checking on a mountain kid who hadn’t been coming to school. My father had this beautiful Harris tweed overcoat. He came back with a knife cut all down one side. The parents had told him it was none of his business why their son wasn’t going to school.”

— Charles Frazier

49. “The man had asked, Why do you want sheep? The wool? Meat? Monroe’s answer had been, For the atmosphere.”

— Charles Frazier

50. “The window apparently wanted only to take his thoughts back. Which was fine with him, for he had seen the metal face of the age and had been so stunned by it that when he thought into the future, all he could vision was a world from which everything he had counted important had been banished or had willingly fled.”

— Charles Frazier