Charles Frazier (born November 4, 1950) is an American novelist. He won the 1997 National Book Award for Fiction for Cold Mountain.
It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.
The past is a stronger influence in the South. But I think everywhere you have this sense that the world changes faster than you can accommodate yourself to. Looking back and seeing how you got where you are is a useful way to combat disorientation.
But I believe the words entered me and changed me and still work in me. The words eat me and sustain me. And when I'm dead and in a box in the dark dark ground, and all my various souls have died and I am nothing but insensible bones, something in the marrow will still feel yearning, desire persisting beyond flesh.
He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.
Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.
I've lived out West some. . . I've always liked the High Plains areas - eastern Colorado, eastern Wyoming, western Nebraska.
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.
From my childhood, I remember a tiny old woman named Mary, made pale and almost translucent by time. Mary's childhood memories extended back to the confusing and violent finale of the Civil War, and she told stories of brutal murders in those days and refused to name some of the killers, as if dead men might still be prosecuted in the late 1950s.
One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then 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 argument that life did not just happen.
No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past having 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.
I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear. . . And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter. " "I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't see why not you. " "Why not me?
Nothing changes what alreaday happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.
She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.
Surely it is a sin to reject the few gifts we are given. Be happy in the flash of time granted to us or hurt forever.
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.
I met people when we lived down in Raleigh who'd ask where I grew up, and I'd say about two hours west of Asheville, and they'd say they didn't know there was any North Carolina two hours west of Asheville. It was in many ways an isolated place.
So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life - joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss - from fire into smoke rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.
But she couldn't dismiss easily his light touch with her. No pushing or pressing, none of that herding and corralling bullshit, unlike any of her old boyfriends. And maybe who you fell for and who you eventually loved wasn't rational, no matter how hard you tried to list pros and cons and sum the results. You couldn't think your way through it, not all the way. Maybe just the scent of somebody carried more weight than everything else put together.
Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.
Contentment is mostly a matter of talking yourself into believing that God will not strike you too hard for leaning in the direction of your hungers.