Search quotes

1 2 3 4 5 ▲ ▼

Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
59252f4	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.		past-and-future	Charles Frazier
1f8aa0b	Among themselves, they had figured out how to go about marriage so as to accomplish the least damage. The husbands lived two hours away...			Charles Frazier
9abf2a9	How would you ever come to know God's name for that star? - You wouldn't, He holds it close, the boy said. It's a thing you'll never know. It's a lesson that sometimes we're meant to settle for ignorance. Right there's what mostly comes of knowledge [boy tips his chin at the battlefield]		knowledge-brings-death knowledge	Charles Frazier
66cb2ef	Ada wondered about his hundreds of tunes. Where were they now and where might they go if he died.			Charles Frazier
517d291	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, yet hard for Luce to learn. She couldn't			Charles Frazier
a986343	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.		romance flame-of-romance men-and-women	Charles Frazier
b85631a	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
8d61eb3	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
307c2db	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
8554609	I wonder what people talk about who've destroyed their lives with addictions other than books and politics and money and war.			Charles Frazier
7667b32	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
5af7201	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
f938c6c	Subtract everything inessential from America and what's left? Geography and political philosophy, V says. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The Federalist Papers. --I'd say geography and mythology, James says. Our legends. He gives examples, talks about Columbus sailing past the edge of the world, John Smith at Jamestown and Puritans at Plymouth Rock, conquering the howling wilderness. Benjamin Franklin going from rags to ri..			Charles Frazier
8cddd6b	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
f4e9fe6	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
0e4b0e8	Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots.			Charles Frazier
361301e	His best talent had yet to be determined, unless you counted unrealized potential.		talents potential	Charles Frazier
3442d93	They agreed they neither gave two hoots now as to how marriages were normally conducted. They would do as they pleased and run their lives by the roll of the seasons. In autumn the apple trees would be bright and heavy with apples and they would hunt birds together, since Ada had proved so successful with the turkeys. They would not hunt with the gaudy Italian piece of Monroe's but with fine simple shotguns they would order from England. In..			Charles Frazier
4dbecca	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.		nature inspirational cold-mountain inman north-carolina	Charles Frazier
6442b45	Then tell me of your long journey home, Ada said. Inman thought about it, but then he let himself imagine he had at last come out on the far side of trouble and had no wish to revisit it, so he told only how along the way he watched the nights of the moon and counted them out to twenty-eight and then started over, how he watched Orion climb higher up the slope of sky night by night, and how he had tried to walk with no hope and no fear but ..		war trauma	Charles Frazier
e447653	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
d7dd330	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
f9ecef4	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.			Charles Frazier
cd52da2	A 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.		time truth	Charles Frazier
b507b3c	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?		memories	Charles Frazier
075437b	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
88bf024	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.		special-needs special-needs-children	Charles Frazier
adb1bfd	had that to understand each other by, though otherwise they could not have been more alien to each other. In short			Charles Frazier
9948beb	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
fce1ef0	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 ..		soldiers ptsd	Charles Frazier
96b7201	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
96d9313	We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed our past life like a pair of wet and muddy trousers, just roll their heavy clinging fabric down our legs and step away. We also reach a point where we would give the rest of our withering days for the month of July in our seventeenth year. But no thread of Ariadne exists to lead us back there.			Charles Frazier
100d541	Words from a tongue ten thousand years old. Words for gold and silver, brass and iron. The names of the gods that the king and his men and whores praise above all. Things you can weigh on a scale or measure by a ruler or add and divide and count out piece by piece in order to sell. Daniel says that right that minute, the one instant they're all living in, it's the king getting weighed and measured and counted. And Belshazzar comes up short...			Charles Frazier
83b97a6	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
836b0e7	Please, V says. Scribble. James opens his notebook and writes, The island was a separate place, situated partway between America and the moon. Some clear nights out with the telescope--moon full or gibbous--I felt about equidistant between the sharp-edged craters and the sparkling lights of America across the harbor. I knew that off the island very particular rules and laws and customs about skin color and blood degree applied, that the ent..			Charles Frazier
7aba38f	History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic. People suffer and die in ignorance and delusion.			Charles Frazier
cb9be1b	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. On the old side, you're left with wrinkled age and whatever fractu..			Charles Frazier
7772f41	great loss wasn't that simple. You couldn't just wish yourself out of it. You had to go through it all the way, had to let grief roll over you like Mississippi floodwater until it decided to let you rise to the surface and keep going, more beaten and broken than before.			Charles Frazier
d9e1021	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
2feefdf	You can mire yourself in the past, but you can't change a damn thing in that lost world.			Charles Frazier
0be156f	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.		humanity inhumanity	Charles Frazier
05f5ee2	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.		place-in-the-world	Charles Frazier
ca3a19e	When time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.			Charles Frazier
83bc364	It does your mind good to talk to people different from you.			Charles Frazier

1 2 3 4 5 ▲ ▼