But one day leads to another, and so on. No way around it. It's that merciless thing that time does.
I know I don't need him, but I think I want him. 
Lily's spirit neediness expressed itself raw as a kerosene blaze in the material world. 
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. 
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. 
The horror is other people. The things they think up to do to you. 
Lola's only nugget of wisdom to her little daughters was Never cry, never ever. 
When everything is immediately available and infinitely reproducible, nothing is valuable. 
Magic singers proclaiming hope and despair in the dark. 
They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining! 
If I had to give up reading or give up listening to music, I suspect I'd stick with the music. 
In her heart, though, she wondered, Is anything remembered forever? 
Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless. 
She always carried a book, though, in case she needed to read a few pages to avoid unwanted conversation. 
The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom. 
Disease is nature's revenge for our destructiveness. 
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. 
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 
Needing and getting don't seem likely to match up any time soon ... What needs doing is mine to do. 
Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent. 
It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well. 
At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. 
He is so full of manure, that man, we could lay him in the dirt and grow another one just like him." Ruby about her dad in "Cold Mountain 
And also forever too late for Lily to learn that raging passion predicts nothing but a mess of bad news for everybody. 
If you're not who you want to be, at least act like who you want it be. - Bud 
Our worst pain is confined within our own skin. 
Literacy: Blessing? Or curse? 
Among themselves, they had figured out how to go about marriage so as to accomplish the least damage. t The husbands lived two hours away... 
He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret. 
They did what they did, and moved forward despite whatever trail of ashes they left behind. ![Charles Frazier quotes: [No] matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.](http://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/charles-frazier-quotes-1086599.jpg "Charles Frazier quotes: [No] matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.")
[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 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. 
If I had a brother in jail and one in Georgia, I'd try to bust the one out of Georgia first. 
I had never taken creative writing classes. Hadn't even considered it. 
Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots. 
Nothing changes what alreaday happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't. 
After she had licked the last white drop of the ice cream, she reached out her cone to Mrs. McKennet and said, Here's your little horn back. 
We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical 
Had that to understand each other by, though otherwise they could not have been more alien to each other. In short 
Verbs. All of them tiring. 
There was nothing about her story remarkable other than that it was her life. 
I've lived out West some ... I've always liked the High Plains areas - eastern Colorado, eastern Wyoming, western Nebraska. 
I was 46 when 'Cold Mountain' came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm. 
He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been burned out of him but he was yet walking. 
The man had asked, Why do you want sheep? The wool? Meat? Monroe's answer had been, For the atmosphere. 
People who are isolated interest me, whether they isolate themselves or have been isolated by circumstances. 
But God in his infinite wisdome had apparently thought it was an entertaining idea for us to always be wanting to get up in one another. 