“Survive long enough and you get to a far point in life where nothing else of particular interest is going to happen. After that, if you don’t watch out, you can spend all your time tallying your losses and gains in endless narrative. All you love has fled or been taken away. Everything fallen from you except the possibility of jolting and unforewarned memory springing out of the dark, rushing over you with the velocity of heartbreak. May walking down the hall humming an old song—“The Girl I Left Behind Me”—or the mere fragrance of clove in spiced tea can set you weeping and howling when all you’ve been for weeks on end is numb.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Thirteen Moons
“It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Thirteen Moons
“You never know when somebody will pull you to them.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Thirteen Moons
“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, quote from Thirteen Moons
“My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Thirteen Moons
“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?”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Thirteen Moons
“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, quote from Thirteen Moons
“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.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Thirteen Moons
“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, quote from Thirteen Moons
“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.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Thirteen Moons
“...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.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Thirteen Moons
“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 change and brutal loss had been all they had experienced for two centuries.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Thirteen Moons
“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, quote from Thirteen Moons
“Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Thirteen Moons
“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, quote from Thirteen Moons
“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 ways, the clans and the mothers, blood degree be damned? Or by what language someone dreams in or prays in or curses in? Or whether they cook bean bread and still tell the tales of Spearfinger and Uktena by the winter fire and go to water when they’re sick? And what if they did all those things but were blond and square-headed as Norsemen? Or do we just hold a dry oak leaf to their cheeks and cull by whether they are darker or lighter?”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Thirteen Moons
Charles Frazier
Born place: in Asheville, North Carolina, The United States
Born date November 4, 1950
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“Up until then, I'd never met anyone who looked at me so earnestly, and there was never anyone who really paid attention to what I said. I realized that I'm still right here - that I'm still alive. In that moment I was happy. Maybe it's not something anyone can understand , but I was happy”
― Gong Jiyoung, quote from Watashitachi no Shiawase na Jikan
“For any human being, freedom is essential, crucial, to our dignity and our ability to be fully human.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“I met Jose Angelico the way I meet many of my customers. I have a workshop on the cemetery road, just past the coffin makers. I specialize in the small, simple stone. I am very aware that my clients have next to nothing, and renting the grave has often taken most of their money. So I modify and modify and get down to the very lowest cost. The dead, however, must have that stone: the reminder, the eternal reminder, that this man, this woman, this child---existed. On some of the graves the name is marked in paint, or even pen, and everyone knows how sad that is. Make something out of stone, I say, and noone touches the grave.The poor are not buried, you see. There is not enough ground here any more, so in the Naravo they build upwards. The graves of the poor are concrete boxes, each just big enough for the coffin. They go up and up---in some parts twenty boxes high. A funeral here is to slide the coffin in and watch the sealing of the compartment. Part of my service is that I cement the stone that I've made into place, and thus seal the chamber.”
― Andy Mulligan, quote from Trash
“But alas! my Lord, what is blood! what is nobility! We are all reptiles, miserable, sinful creatures. It is piety alone that can distinguish us from the dust whence we sprung, and whither we must return.”
― Horace Walpole, quote from The Castle of Otranto
“Give her a weak man and she'll inadvertently run rings around him. He simply wasn't strong enough for her.”
― Sarah Rayner, quote from One Moment, One Morning
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