Top 150 Charles Frazier Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Publishers give you deadlines for those last phases of production that are perfectly comfortable for them. So, to whatever extent I can, I like to push those to give me a little more time, and make it so that they’re as uncomfortable as I am.”

— Charles Frazier

52. “Her need to shape memory into history.”

— Charles Frazier

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

— Charles Frazier

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

— Charles Frazier

55. “Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consciousness, we call our response sacred.”

— Charles Frazier

56. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

57. “I’ve never been very attached to genre labels and never set out intentionally to write historic fiction. Besides, what you consider historic depends on how far back your memory extends.”

— Charles Frazier

58. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

59. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

60. “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

61. “It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.”

— Charles Frazier

62. “Our worst pain is confined within our own skin.”

— Charles Frazier

63. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

64. “I wonder what people talk about who’ve destroyed their lives with addictions other than books and politics and money and war.”

— Charles Frazier

65. “He said, I’ve been coming for you on a hard road. I’m never letting you go. Never.”

— Charles Frazier

66. “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?”

— Charles Frazier

67. “The Sixties were different in an isolated place. We got two television channels if the wind was blowing in the right direction. The radio stations went off at sundown. Then you picked up Chicago and heard the teenage music you really yearned for.”

— Charles Frazier

68. “If every generation helps the next take one step up, imagine where we might all be someday.”

— Charles Frazier

69. “Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in Black Mask magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.”

— Charles Frazier

70. “I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She’s still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she’ll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope. She sees me and backs away in horror while I try to explain why I made the choices I made.”

— Charles Frazier

71. “One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held more for him than just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift, but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen.”

— Charles Frazier

72. “Contentment is mostly a matter of talking yourself into believing that God will not strike you too hard for leaning in the direction of your hungers.”

— Charles Frazier

73. “You never know when somebody will pull you to them.”

— Charles Frazier

74. “He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been burned out of him but he was yet walking.”

— Charles Frazier

75. “The past is a stronger influence in the South. But I think everywhere you have this sense that the world changes faster than you can accommodate yourself to. Looking back and seeing how you got where you are is a useful way to combat disorientation.”

— Charles Frazier

76. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

77. “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...”

— Charles Frazier

78. “Humans are inhuman, whether it’s by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.”

— Charles Frazier

79. “The comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings.”

— Charles Frazier

80. “When Ada disappeared into the trees, it was like a part of the richness of the world had gone with her. 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

81. “They were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment.”

— Charles Frazier

82. “I decided that many of Bear’s stories and comments shared a general drift. They advised against fearing all of creation. But not because it is always benign, for it is not. It will, with certainty, consume us all. We are made to be destroyed. We are kindling for the fire, and our lives will stand as naught against the onrush of time. Bear’s position, if I understood it, was that refusal to fear these general terms of existence is an honorable act of defiance.”

— Charles Frazier

83. “Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace.”

— Charles Frazier

84. “He saw with sorrow that hers was a life he could step right into and keep working at hard from tonight until death. If he allowed himself to ponder it for a minute, he saw all the world hanging over the girl like the deadfall to a trap, ready to drop and crush.”

— Charles Frazier

85. “So, standing here looking at you, all grown up, the question I ask is simple. In the long run, how different is a goddam hot dog from a Vienna sausage?”

— Charles Frazier

86. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

87. “Back then, he’d have to leave at the end of August for the start of school, so the week before Labor Day became it’s own tiny season of gloom, like a hundred Sunday nights crowded together.”

— Charles Frazier

88. “Magic singers proclaiming hope and despair in the dark.”

— Charles Frazier

89. “His spells portrayed the spirit as a frail thing, contstantly under attack and in need of stength, always threatening to die inside you. Inman found this notion dismal indeed, since he had been taught by sermon and hymn to hold as truth that the soul of man never dies.”

— Charles Frazier

90. “V has finally learned that sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice. And even when it’s not, those around you become uncomfortable because they think you are wise.”

— Charles Frazier

91. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

92. “Ada wondered about his hundreds of tunes. Where were they now and where might they go if he died.”

— Charles Frazier

93. “Some far day when she had become a better person and could feel something besides stinging anger that her beautiful, gentle sister had not protected herself more carefully against a world of threat.”

— Charles Frazier

94. “Children rediscover their parents wisdom when they finally become adults themselves.”

— Charles Frazier

95. “Remembering doesn’t change anything – it will always have happened. But forgetting won’t erase it either.”

— Charles Frazier

96. “In her heart, though, she wondered, Is anything remembered forever?”

— Charles Frazier

97. “From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and howls. Nevertheless the beautiful and familiar tune was impervious to poor performance, and Inman thought how painfully young it sounded, as if the pattern of its notes allowed no room to imagine a future clouded and tangled and diminished.”

— Charles Frazier

98. “You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.”

— Charles Frazier

99. “If you mean slaves, you only remember what they allowed you to remember. Even if Davis Bend was really as humane as you believe, they kept their misery to themselves, kept it a mystery to you. I promise that’s true. Think of it as a great gift, a mark of affection. Their protection of your memory.”

— Charles Frazier

100. “Had she been an old woman who long ago in her youth sang beautifully, one might have said that she had learned to use the diminished nature of her voice to maximum effect, that it was a lesson in how to live with damage, how to make peace with it and use it for what it can do. But she was not an old woman.”

— Charles Frazier