Quote

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.

Charles Frazier

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Charles Frazier
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 4
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Asheville
North Carolina
Love
Pieces
Damn
Life
Joy
Smoke
Dissipating
Fire
Terror
Transforms
Courses
Painful
Breeze
Course
Sorrow
Nevertheless
Age
Air
Hate
Necessary
Bliss
Time
Youth
Rising

More quotes by Charles Frazier

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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.
Charles Frazier
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When all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. Only desire trumps time.
Charles Frazier
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It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond to
Charles Frazier
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Publishers give you deadlines for those last phases of production that are perfectly comfortable for them. So, to whatever extent I can, I like to push those to give me a little more time, and make it so that they're as uncomfortable as I am.
Charles Frazier
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Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.
Charles Frazier
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He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.
Charles Frazier
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A lizard in the spring - hear his darling sing. A bird with wings to fly - go back to his darling weep and moan till he dies. A mole in the ground - root a mountain down.
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Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don't just survive. Celebrate.
Charles Frazier
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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. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.
Charles Frazier
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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.
Charles Frazier
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That's just pain she said. It goes eventually. And when it's gone, there's no lasting memory. Not the worst of it anyway. It fades. Our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It's a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us.
Charles Frazier
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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.
Charles Frazier
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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.
Charles Frazier
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Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in Black Mask magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
Charles Frazier
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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.
Charles Frazier
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I've always thought Harper Lee might have made a great decision. Much as you'd like to have more books by her, there's something about just one that's kind of mysterious and nice. On the other hand, the New York gossip about me was that I'd never write another book. So I thought, 'Well, I will then.
Charles Frazier
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Well, I'm a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not.
Charles Frazier
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Needing and getting don’t seem likely to match up any time soon... What needs doing is mine to do.
Charles Frazier
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One time at the University of Colorado, at a faculty dinner, this professor said to me, 'Well, my goodness, a boy from Appa-lay-chee-a with a Ph.D!' The dinner was in her house. And I said, 'My grandparents didn't have indoor plumbing, but they had more books in their house than you do.' I was a little insulted by the Appa-lay-chee-a business.
Charles Frazier
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Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn't change them. most of the time, they couldn't change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance.
Charles Frazier