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06c7154
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Oh, Mary said, life is mostly just what happens. Choice or chance or fate, gods or not. Like it or not. Things happen, we do what we think is in our best interests or just convenient, and then we live with the consequences.
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Charles Frazier |
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3aa5e4a
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she claimed it's a sign of God's mercy that He won't let us remember the reddest details of pain. He knows the parts we can't bear and won't let our minds render them again. In time, from disuse, they pale away. At least such was her thinking. God lays the unbearable on you and then takes some back.
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pain
unbearable
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Charles Frazier |
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7cb083b
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Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.
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Charles Frazier |
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584db52
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By now he had stared at the window through a late summer so hot and wet that the air both day and night felt like breathing through a dishrag, so damp it caused fresh sheets to sour under him and tiny black mushrooms to grow overnight from the limp pages of the book on his bedside table. Inman suspected that after such long examination, the grey window had finally said all it had to say.
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Charles Frazier |
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3ab2a71
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Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace.
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solitude
woods
quiet
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Charles Frazier |
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c6fa81b
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Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent.
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Charles Frazier |
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6b242e1
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Lily's spirit neediness expressed itself raw as a kerosene blaze in the material world.
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Charles Frazier |
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5a9f38e
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Like when the counselor delved into your habits of using a public toilet, such as do you flush with your foot and use your elbow to open the door? If yes, woe unto you. You're crazy.
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Charles Frazier |
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832ac2b
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as was true of all 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.
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Charles Frazier |
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1d54702
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Lola's only nugget of wisdom to her little daughters was Never cry, never ever.
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Charles Frazier |
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b092f38
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it was pointless to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, for you can grieve you..
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Charles Frazier |
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a0d3307
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Humans are inhuman, whether it's by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.
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Charles Frazier |
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2e9365c
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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..
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teenagers
teens
remembering
reminiscence
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Charles Frazier |
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6fa176a
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A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all 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,..
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Charles Frazier |
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ae65e72
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Whether you pick well or poorly, the act of choosing carries grief. Leaves you wondering, years later, what life might have been had you chosen differently. . . . Or even wishing you'd simply paused, taken a long, deep breath. Not allowed the personal moment and the pattern of your family and your stupid culture to shove you two-handed from behind, forcing you to stumble unbalanced into the future
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Charles Frazier |
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bddaf98
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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.
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Charles Frazier |
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20b9826
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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.
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Charles Frazier |
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da4e0b8
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Monroe had in fact preached that God was not at all such a one as ourselves, not one to be temperamentally inclined to tread ragefully upon us until our blood flew up and stained all His white raiment, but rather that He looked on both the best and worst of mankind with weary, bemused pity.
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Charles Frazier |
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19aadfe
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Remembering doesn't change anything--it will always have happened. But forgetting won't erase it either.
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Charles Frazier |
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42e457a
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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 honorab..
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Charles Frazier |
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ef90584
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After she had licked the last white drop of the ice cream, she reached out her cone to Mrs. McKennet and said, "Here's your little horn back."
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Charles Frazier |
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8c6bb09
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He said, I've been coming for you on a hard road. I'm never letting you go. Never.
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love-quotes
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Charles Frazier |
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070022e
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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.
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Charles Frazier |
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3a6cc28
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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.
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Charles Frazier |
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f3330ce
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It is tempting to look back at Bear's people from the perspective of this modern world and see them as changeless and pure, authentic people in ways impossible for anybody to be anymore. We need Noble Savages for our own purposes. Our happy imaginings about them and the pure world they occupied do us good when incoherent change overwhelms us. But even in those early days when I was first getting to know Bear and his people, I could see that..
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Charles Frazier |
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4dd8e4f
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They did not talk much while they ate, other than for Ada to say that the Georgia boy did not seem like much of a one as far as men went. Ruby said she found him not particularly worse than the general order of men, which is to say that he would greatly benefit from having someone's foot in his back every waking minute.
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Charles Frazier |
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07e1c24
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and all the ministers of the various types of local Baptists had declined to participate in retribution for Monroe's failure to believe in a God with severe limitations on His patience and mercy.
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Charles Frazier |
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ded6a36
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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?
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humor
nightwoods
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Charles Frazier |
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4aed0eb
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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 defia..
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Charles Frazier |
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5453276
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To Ada, Ruby's monologues seemed composed mainly of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill.
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Charles Frazier |
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a3f8774
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deep belief that your moment in time is the pinnacle, the only standard of judgment extending from the creation of light until the black apocalypse, that what you believe right now is eternal truth because you believe it so fervently--those deep beliefs so crucial at the moment but none of them more permanent than a puff of air across a palmful of dry talcum
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Charles Frazier |
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65d695c
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And she [Ada] thought momentarily that she ought to worry about losing her beauty, about having become brown and stringy and rough. And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life.
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beauty-fades-away
different-self
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Charles Frazier |
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62b652f
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He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the los..
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war
hope
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Charles Frazier |
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b60d833
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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.
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happiness
love
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Charles Frazier |
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ad3bef9
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than appreciating the calm voice of Charleston during an evening walk along the Battery with Fort Sumter off in the distance, the great white houses at one's back, palmettos rattling their leaves in a sea breeze.
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Charles Frazier |
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691ce61
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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.
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wisdom
waiting
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Charles Frazier |
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8a2236b
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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.
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facts
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Charles Frazier |
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e3ac618
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After years of loss and reflection, your old deluded decisions click together like the works of a watch packed tight within its case--many tiny, turning, interlocking wheels....the force of every decision transferring gear to gear, wheel to wheel, each one motivating a larger energy going in no direction but steep downward to darkness at an increasing pitch. And then one morning the world resembles Noah's flood, stretching unrecognizable to..
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Charles Frazier |
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08a3001
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Identity, though, is a difficult matter to tease out, especially in a time of flux. How to tell a spaniel from a retriever when all dogs have become middle-sized and brown? Should we go by some arbitrary blood quantum wherein half makes an Indian and forty-nine percent makes something else? Certainly forty-nine percent does not a whiteman make, at least not by the laws then prevailing in our state and most others. Or do we go by the old way..
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Charles Frazier |
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15b9f40
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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.
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love-quotes
what-if-quote
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Charles Frazier |
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2b3d1b6
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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.
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voice-quotes
singing-voice
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Charles Frazier |
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45dd991
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Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619.
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Charles Frazier |
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e332277
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Children rediscover their parents wisdom when they finally become adults themselves.
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Charles Frazier |
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f388d87
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So, a little morphine, a good sweat, and a bowel movement--the cure for everything that ails you.
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Charles Frazier |