Charles Frazier citations

“He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.”

“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?”

“What you have lost will not be returned to you; it always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on, or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you.”

“[No] matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.”

“I know I don't need him, but I think I want him.”

“We are not strong enough to stand up against endless grief, And yet pain is the constant drone of life. So if we are to have any happiness at all, it is only in the passing instant.”

“Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.”

“He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better.”

“What I'm certain I don't want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.”

“Our worst pain is confined within our own skin.”

“Verbs. All of them tiring.”

“She always carried a book, though, in case she needed to read a few pages to avoid unwanted conversation.”

“That's not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn't suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on”

“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.”

“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.”

“It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.”

“When everything is immediately available and infinitely reproducible, nothing is valuable.”