“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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“For now, his talk may be exciting, but it will pale with time. He will repeat himself and embellish on his lies, and doubts will grow. When we reach the temple and they see no reward for their wrong-placed faith, yes, it will be difficult, but they will come away stronger, for even the unkindest truth strengthens a man more than the prettiest lie.”
― R. Lee Smith, quote from The Last Hour of Gann
“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are. Our selves could be compared to an amoeba, whose outer walls are elastic, and therefore adapt to the environment. It is not that the amoeba has no dimensions, simply that it has no self-defined shape. It is my absurdist side that an absurdist person will draw out of me, and my seriousness that a serious person will evoke. If someone thinks I am shy, I will probably end up shy, if someone thinks me funny, I am likely to keep cracking jokes.”
― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love
“Ferrin looked at her like she had two heads. “You don’t want to marry my son?” “Hell. No.” He resumed his seat. “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say.”
― Chris Cannon, quote from Going Down in Flames
“It’s not my place to tell him to stop drinking,” Shelly said. “But being with him or talking to him when he’s drunk is my business.” That’s the difference between boundaries and controlling. We can’t make a person stop drinking. But we can refuse to talk to or date that person. Boundaries concern our behavior—what we will or won’t do. It’s not a boundary if we can’t enforce it. Be clear. If people have room to misinterpret, they will. People hear what they want to and what causes the least pain. We won’t be clear with others if we’re not clear with ourselves. Sometimes we don’t like their behavior, but we don’t want to lose the relationship, so our boundaries are murky.”
― Melody Beattie, quote from The New Codependency: Help and Guidance for Today's Generation
“Maybe you can’t blame people for the pain that makes them who they are. Maybe that was just one more bullet you had to step in front of for someone you were supposed to love—even if you didn’t want to. Even if it hurt. Maybe that was love.”
― Anthony Breznican, quote from Brutal Youth
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