Thirteen Moons Quotes

“Survive long enough and you get to a far point in life where nothing else of particular interest is going to happen. After that, if you don’t watch out, you can spend all your time tallying your losses and gains in endless narrative. All you love has fled or been taken away. Everything fallen from you except the possibility of jolting and unforewarned memory springing out of the dark, rushing over you with the velocity of heartbreak. May walking down the hall humming an old song—“The Girl I Left Behind Me”—or the mere fragrance of clove in spiced tea can set you weeping and howling when all you’ve been for weeks on end is numb.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“You never know when somebody will pull you to them.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“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.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless, he wondered why the white people were not better than they are, having had it for so long. He promised that just as soon as white people achieved Christianity, he would recommend it to his own folks.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“That's the way it is at some point in life. An inevitable consequence of living. A lot of things begin falling away.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“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.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“...I had always believed prayer ought to be conducted on our feet rather than on our knees, since God seems in all other departments of life to require us to stand upright and account for ourselves.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“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.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“It is tempting to look back at Bear’s people from the perspective of this modern world and see them as changeless and pure, authentic people in ways impossible for anybody to be anymore. We need Noble Savages for our own purposes. Our happy imaginings about them and the pure world they occupied do us good when incoherent change overwhelms us. But even in those early days when I was first getting to know Bear and his people, I could see that change and brutal loss had been all they had experienced for two centuries.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“It is best not to study too much on who gets what they deserve. It can lead to an overly complicated interpretation of God’s personal attributes.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“I decided that many of Bear’s stories and comments shared a general drift. They advised against fearing all of creation. But not because it is always benign, for it is not. It will, with certainty, consume us all. We are made to be destroyed. We are kindling for the fire, and our lives will stand as naught against the onrush of time. Bear’s position, if I understood it, was that refusal to fear these general terms of existence is an honorable act of defiance.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“almost nothing in life is epic or tragic at the moment of its enactment. History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic. People suffer and die in ignorance and delusion.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“wonders of domination can be accomplished by the overwhelming and single-minded application of force,”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed our past life like a pair of wet and muddy trousers, just roll their heavy clinging fabric down our legs and step away. We also reach a point where we would give the rest of our withering days for the month of July in our seventeenth year. But no thread of Ariadne exists to lead us back there.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“our inner selves can’t help but come along”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic. People suffer and die in ignorance and delusion.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“All I can say is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“many of Bear’s stories and comments shared a general drift. They advised against fearing all of creation. But not because it is always benign, for it is not. It will, with certainty, consume us all. We are made to be destroyed. We are kindling for the fire, and our lives will stand as naught against the onrush of time. Bear’s position, if I understood it, was that refusal to fear these general terms of existence is an honorable act of defiance.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“From Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons, Featherstone to Will, p. 316: "You're making a young man's mistake. You need to let your anger fall away. It won't get you where you want to be. It's poison. But it will rise from you like smoke from a fire if you let it go. And anger is not a becoming features as you grow older.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“I passed out cigars to the men, and we lit them with a twig caught alight in the fire and passed the bottle around. Charley was doing most of the talking, telling a hunting story from the days of elk and bison, neither of which anyone in attendance except Charley had ever seen. He made them epic animals in his story, inhabitants of an old and better world not to come around again. He then told of his lost farmstead at the old mound village of Cowee, before one of the many disastrous treaties had driven him and his family west to Nantayale. At Cowee, he has been noted for his success with apple trees, which over the years he had planted at spots where his outhouses had stood. Apples grew on his trees huge as dreams of apples. That Cowee house was old, from the time when they still buried dead loved ones in the dirt floor.”
― Charles Frazier , Thirteen Moons

“That’s the way it is at some point in life. An inevitable consequence of living. A lot of things begin falling away.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“Identity, though, is a difficult matter to tease out, especially in a time of flux. How to tell a spaniel from a retriever when all dogs have become middle-sized and brown? Should we go by some arbitrary blood quantum wherein half makes an Indian and forty-nine percent makes something else? Certainly forty-nine percent does not a whiteman make, at least not by the laws then prevailing in our state and most others. Or do we go by the old ways, the clans and the mothers, blood degree be damned? Or by what language someone dreams in or prays in or curses in? Or whether they cook bean bread and still tell the tales of Spearfinger and Uktena by the winter fire and go to water when they’re sick? And what if they did all those things but were blond and square-headed as Norsemen? Or do we just hold a dry oak leaf to their cheeks and cull by whether they are darker or lighter?”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“Most of the travel was purposeless, carried out in exactly the desperate spirit of fleeing from pursuers. It was romantic, in a certain sense. Especially if you’re not the one doing it.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“I told one of the writers that our fields were so nearly vertical that we planted our corn with a shotgun and had to breed a race of mules with legs shorter on one side than the other for plowing. And when he asked how we transported the corn down off the mountain, I said, in a jug. He appeared to believe me, so I was encouraged to go on and tell him that every church in that corner of the state, except our Indian congregation, either conducted services speaking entirely in tongues or else took up serpents as recommended by Jesus. Both the writer and I had taken a few rounds of Scotch at the time. The story appeared as fact in a well-known national periodical, along with the obligatory descriptions of the beauty and ruggedness and unmatched remoteness and mystery of our mountains.”
― Charles Frazier , Thirteen Moons

“We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“I CANNOT DECIDE WHETHER IT IS AN ILLNESS OR A SIN, THE NEED TO write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons