Nightwoods Quotes

“Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don't just survive. Celebrate.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“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, Nightwoods

“Life can get fucked up fast when you try to be a pleaser. Because people won't ever be pleased, not even if you drop them ass-first into paradise. They like bitching too much.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

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

“Nothing changes what alreaday happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“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.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“If you're not who you want to be, at least act like who you want it be. - Bud”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“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.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“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.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“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, Nightwoods

“A distressingly large portion of the world doesn't do you any good whatsoever.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“The horror is other people. The things they think up to do to you.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“They did what they did, and moved forward despite whatever trail of ashes they left behind.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“So she guessed you could word hard to make yourself who you wanted to be and yet find that the passing years had transformed you beyond your own recognition. End up disappointed in yourself, despite your best efforts.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“You try your best to love the world despite obvious flaws in design and execution and you take care of whatever needy things present themselves to you during your passage through it. Otherwise you're worthless.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“People don't change, Lola said. Maybe you're still young enough to pretend that's not true. People are who they are, and everybody around them has to take it or go somewhere else.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“What they need is everything even and smooth. Not love or hate, pleasure or pain, hope or fear, safety or danger. Nobody kissing your cheek at bedtime till you tingle with pleasure in your stomach, and nobody making you bleed. Accept one and you have to accept the other, that's the deal.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“But she knew the black hole pulled at you. You stand up to it, or you go down.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past have 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. A simple enough lesson, yet hard for Luce to learn. She couldn’t”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“No looking back. Life goes one way only. And whatever opinions you hold about the past have 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. A simple enough lesson...”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“By way of conclusion, Luce said, I lived through it [the rape], so if you can't stand to hear it, you can take me home and go to hell. Men get so damn strange sometimes.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“In the hovering between sleep and wakefulness, lucid but dreaming, Luce's mind got away from her, and all kinds of empty shit she had meant to put entirely behind her forever swam up and lived in her head again.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“But one day leads to another, and so on. No way around it. It's that merciless thing that time does.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“Some far day when she had become a better person and could feel something besides stinging anger that her beautiful, gentle sister had not protected herself more carefully against a world of threat.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“Magic singers proclaiming hope and despair in the dark.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“And also forever too late for Lily to learn that raging passion predicts nothing but a mess of bad news for everybody.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“Where had he been? Drinking, obviously. Then she started cataloging all the ways he was worthless.
On fool impulse, as his most potent available argument against Lily, Bud stuck his hands into his coat pockets and pulled out the many bundles of hundreds and threw them on the bedspread. If you were honest and stupid, you worked a couple of lifetimes for that kind of money, doled out by the hour in pocket-change amounts by asswipe bosses.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“Children rediscover their parents wisdom when they finally become adults themselves.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods