Top 150 Charles Frazier Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Their moral position in converting from slave holders to champions of freedom was about like a house cat on a cold night scooting through a closing door just before the latch clacks shut. But sometimes timing is all. A brief moment of history, less than a deep breath, becomes the difference between inside and outside.”

— Charles Frazier

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

— Charles Frazier

103. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

104. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

105. “When time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.”

— Charles Frazier

106. “And they did what lovers often do when they think the future stretches out endless before them as bright as on the noon of creation day: they talked ceaselessly of the past, as if each must be caught up on the other’s previous doings before they can move forward paired.”

— Charles Frazier

107. “We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed.”

— Charles Frazier

108. “WILDE SAID, I hoped he could offer advice on ways Ireland might free itself. He has been the greatest revolutionary of the past century. – He was never a rebel. He was a businessman and a politician who believed the Constitution protected the capital of his class and culture above everything else.”

— Charles Frazier

109. “Miss Howell, I worry that the pains your father has taken to educate you will result in little but finding himself with a wit on his hands.”

— Charles Frazier

110. “Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin strippd from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless.”

— Charles Frazier

111. “Those teachings had been burned away. But he could not abide by a universe composed only of what he could see, especially when it was so frequently foul.”

— Charles Frazier

112. “History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic. People suffer and die in ignorance and delusion.”

— Charles Frazier

113. “He had long since decided there was little usefulness in speculating much on what a day will bring. It led a person to the equal errors of being either dreadful or hopeful. Neither, in his experience, served to ease your mind.”

— Charles Frazier

114. “Taking the life of a nation is a serious task, V says. Few succeed, even if the cause is just. We didn’t, and ours wasn’t. But sometimes I can’t help missing those days when we all just took care of each other.”

— Charles Frazier

115. “After a time, though, Inman found that he had left the book and was simply forming the topography of home in his head. Cold Mountain, all its ridges and coves and watercourses. Pigeon River, Little East Fork, Sorrell Cove, Deep Gap, Fire Scald Ridge. He knew their names and said them to himself like the words of spells and incantations to ward off the things one fears most.”

— Charles Frazier

116. “So, a little morphine, a good sweat, and a bowel movement – the cure for everything that ails you.”

— Charles Frazier

117. “Inman felt like God’s most marauded bantling.”

— Charles Frazier

118. “I do know that however hard you try, you can’t see the inside tangle of somebody else’s love – or whatever uglier word applies – not deep enough to make sense of it.”

— Charles Frazier

119. “How very sad anniversaries become. They are for the young and hopeful and for the very old and hopeless. A spark of expectation reveals the gloomy, weary waste.”

— Charles Frazier

120. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

121. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

122. “Luce, sitting near the back, all of this new to her, likes to believe her children are nothing like a pair of copperheads amid a field of sweet brown mice.”

— Charles Frazier

123. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

124. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

125. “Mostly the colors of that land stuck to shades of red dirt and black cinders with a few dashes of sickly green. And yet look up, and the sun burned yellow and the sky rolled blue and deep like an argument that the world had not gone wrong at all.”

— Charles Frazier

126. “Earth has not anything to show more fair. Dull would be the soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty.”

— Charles Frazier

127. “Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619.”

— Charles Frazier

128. “It does your mind good to talk to people different from you.”

— Charles Frazier

129. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

130. “But by fusing the best of both sides, a kind of intertwining consciousness arises – grandmother and granddaughter wisdom emerging from shared hope, relieved of emotions tainted by control and guilt and anger.”

— Charles Frazier

131. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

132. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

133. “Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.”

— Charles Frazier

134. “To Ada, though, it seemed akin to miracle that Stobrod, of all people, should offer himself up as proof positive that no matter what a waste one has made of one’s life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.”

— Charles Frazier

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

— Charles Frazier

136. “The mood I was in, I saw the large sweep of America’s history as Florida’s assault on civilization.”

— Charles Frazier

137. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

138. “There in the highlands, clear weather held for much of the time. The air lacked its usual haze, and the view stretched on and on across rows of blue mountains, each paler than the last until the final ranks were indistinguishable from the sky. It was as if all the world might be composed of nothing but valley and ridge.”

— Charles Frazier

139. “You can mire yourself in the past, but you can’t change a damn thing in that lost world.”

— Charles Frazier

140. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

141. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

142. “To him, the world had no order of succession, no causation, no precedent. Everything he saw was new-minted, and thus every day was a parade of wonders.”

— Charles Frazier

143. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

144. “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.”

— Charles Frazier

145. “Head full of sorrows, heart full of dreams. How to maintain the latter as life progresses? How not to let the first cancel the second?”

— Charles Frazier

146. “Luce’s new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent.”

— Charles Frazier

147. “History reveals a person’s deeds – their outward character but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life rounded by a dream – unpenetrated, unguessed.”

— Charles Frazier

148. “He picked out a little twenty-dollar gold piece.”

— Charles Frazier

149. “It was simple, and not one she’d ever found the strength to follow. The idea was, the you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are. And also maybe something about the great reluctance with which we let go of our belief in a just God.”

— Charles Frazier

150. “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.”

— Charles Frazier