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30be337
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That's the way it is at some point in life. An inevitable consequence of living. A lot of things begin falling away.
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Charles Frazier |
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9ce1003
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the path to contentment was to abide by one's own nature and follow it's path.
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Charles Frazier |
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a0c6f7e
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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?
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Charles Frazier |
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0264bfd
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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.
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Charles Frazier |
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dceb4ae
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With the snow piling up outside, the warm dry cabin hidden in its fold of the mountain felt like a safe haven indeed, though it had not been such for the people who had lived there. Soldiers had found them and made the cabin trailhead to a path of exile, loss, and death. But for a while that night, it was a place that held within its walls no pain nor even a vague memory collection of pain.
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native-americans
pain
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Charles Frazier |
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1702ea7
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It's a good thing war is so terrible or else we'd get to liking it too much.
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Charles Frazier |
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776b39e
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She had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in a mirror. She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy or th woman's dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of assurance she seemed to evidence in her very posture. Then Ada took a step forward, and the other woman did too, and Ada realized that it was her..
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women
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Charles Frazier |
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35df582
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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.
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making-the-best-of-situations
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Charles Frazier |
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ce7479b
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So she guessed you could word hard to make yourself who you wanted to be and yet find that the passing years had transformed you beyond your own recognition. End up disappointed in yourself, despite your best efforts.
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Charles Frazier |
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b4f03f6
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But one day leads to another, and so on. No way around it. It's that merciless thing that time does.
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Charles Frazier |
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e9cd8bc
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In the hovering between sleep and wakefulness, lucid but dreaming, Luce's mind got away from her, and all kinds of empty shit she had meant to put entirely behind her forever swam up and lived in her head again.
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Charles Frazier |
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0297431
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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.
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Charles Frazier |
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d138384
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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.
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soul
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Charles Frazier |
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840d33e
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On 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 ar..
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Charles Frazier |
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254d032
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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 ..
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Charles Frazier |
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23284a2
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And also forever too late for Lily to learn that raging passion predicts nothing but a mess of bad news for everybody.
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Charles Frazier |
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a25a7db
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They did what they did, and moved forward despite whatever trail of ashes they left behind.
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Charles Frazier |
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5013d12
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But she knew the black hole pulled at you. You stand up to it, or you go down.
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Charles Frazier |
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b1e5082
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What they need is everything even and smooth. Not love or hate, pleasure or pain, hope or fear, safety or danger. Nobody kissing your cheek at bedtime till you tingle with pleasure in your stomach, and nobody making you bleed. Accept one and you have to accept the other, that's the deal.
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Charles Frazier |
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027fce6
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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.
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greed
kings
presidents
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Charles Frazier |
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e169d83
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You'll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you've been all along.
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Charles Frazier |
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042cd3e
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There was nothing about her story remarkable other than that it was her life.
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Charles Frazier |
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915beed
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Children don't judge their own lives. Normal for them is what's laid before them day by day. Judgment comes later.
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Charles Frazier |
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3e0580b
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If every generation helps the next take one step up, imagine where we might all be someday.
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Charles Frazier |
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1a1925c
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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.
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Charles Frazier |
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6083c32
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I won't go into it any further, other than to say that year by year the world darkens down and things are always going away.
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Charles Frazier |
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7b5d7f9
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No looking back. Life goes one way only. And whatever opinions you hold about the past have 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. A simple enough lesson...
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living-in-the-present
simple-lesson
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Charles Frazier |
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7b4bf6d
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a man's spirit could be torn apart and cease and yet his body keep on living...His spirit blasted away so that he had become lonesome and estranged from all around him...It seemed a poor swap to find that the only way one might keep from fearing death was to act numb and set apart as if dead already.
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Charles Frazier |
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819efdf
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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.
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Charles Frazier |
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a896513
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In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other. It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat. The way Inman saw it, if a thing like Fr..
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oracle
superstition
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Charles Frazier |
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43fb013
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The cabins they passed among seemed solemn in their abandonment, cramped by the watercourse and the overhanging brow of the cloudy mountain. Some of its people might yet be living, and Ada wondered how often they remembered this lonesome place, now still as a held breath. Whatever word they had called it would soon be numbered among the names of things which have not been passed down to us and are exiled from our memories. She doubted that ..
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Charles Frazier |
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d884927
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Musicians add to songs and they evolve: For as was true of human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride. p. 380
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music
songs
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Charles Frazier |
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243d968
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Inman's only thought looking on the enemy was, "Go home."
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Charles Frazier |
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2b3c92f
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Going bearded seemed one less thing to have to fail at.
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Charles Frazier |
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67a11d4
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Inman guessed Swimmer's spells were right in saying a man's spirit could be torn apart and cease and yet his body keep on living. They could take deathblows independently. He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been about burned out of him to fear that the mere existence of the Henry repeating rifle or the eprouvette mortar made all talk of spirit immediately antique. His spirit, he feared..
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Charles Frazier |
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4f9229f
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But God in his infinite wisdome had apparently thought it was an entertaining idea for us to always be wanting to get up in one another.
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Charles Frazier |
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d17958d
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Magic singers proclaiming hope and despair in the dark.
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Charles Frazier |
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539ce58
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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.
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Charles Frazier |
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2273027
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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.
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Charles Frazier |
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3d56fdc
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I had always believed prayer ought to be conducted on our feet rather than on our knees, since God seems in all other departments of life to require us to stand upright and account for ourselves.
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Charles Frazier |
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a518217
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the you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are.
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Charles Frazier |
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bc18244
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Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?
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literacy
reading
reading-books
writing
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Charles Frazier |
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694328a
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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.
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self-reflection
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Charles Frazier |
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7796c5d
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When Luce did look in the mirror, she thought she might still be sort of pretty, if you went by what most people thought was pretty. And if that's the way you went, you had your own problems. It wasn't like being pretty was an accomplishment, and it would go away in time. So it would be a mistake to get too hung up on it.
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Charles Frazier |