Varina Quotes

“Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light declaration about freedom in the other. And then an outlaw sticks a pistol in his face and says give me one or the other. Every time—every ten out of ten —he'll hug the sack and throw away the ideals. Because the sack’s what’s behind the ideals, like the foundation under a building.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“Children don’t judge their own lives. Normal for them is what’s laid before them day by day. Judgment comes later.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“the you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“Never acknowledging that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“V drifts into talking about generations. How grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation—twenty-five years at least—and the anger in both directions dissipates. All the failed expectations and betrayals become cleansed by an intervention of time. Resentment and bitter need for retribution fall away. Love becomes the operative emotion.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“wishing you’d simply paused, taken a long, deep breath. Not allowed the personal moment and the pattern of your family and your stupid culture to shove you two-handed from behind, forcing you to stumble unbalanced into the future.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“The instant passed so fast, and when that happens, it goes for good and all you have is a slow lifetime to speculate on revisions. Except time flows one way and drags us with it no matter how hard we paddle upstream.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“V has finally learned that sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice. And even when it's not, those around you become uncomfortable because they think you are wise.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“If every generation helps the next take one step up, imagine where we might all be someday.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“V drifts into talking about generations. How grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation—twenty-five years at least—and the anger in both directions dissipates. All the failed expectations and betrayals become cleansed by an intervention of time. Resentment and bitter need for retribution fall away. Love becomes the operative emotion. On the old side, you’re left with wrinkled age and whatever fractured, end-of-the-line knowledge might have accrued. Wisdom as exhaustion. And on the other side—which V still remembers with molecular vividness—youth and yearning and urgency for something not yet fully defined. Undiluted hope and desire. But by fusing the best of both sides, a kind of intertwining consciousness arises—grandmother and granddaughter wisdom emerging from shared hope, relieved of emotions tainted by control and guilt and anger. —I’ll assume you’re right, James says. But I wouldn’t know much about long family relationships. When I was”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“Humans are inhuman, whether it’s by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“A deep belief that your moment in time is the pinnacle, the only standard of judgment extending from the creation of light until the black apocalypse, that what you believe right now is eternal truth because you believe it so fervently—those deep beliefs so crucial at the moment but none of them more permanent than a puff of air across a palmful of dry talcum.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“Words from a tongue ten thousand years old. Words for gold and silver, brass and iron. The names of the gods that the king and his men and whores praise above all. Things you can weigh on a scale or measure by a ruler or add and divide and count out piece by piece in order to sell. Daniel says that right that minute, the one instant they’re all living in, it’s the king getting weighed and measured and counted. And Belshazzar comes up short. He’s been using the wrong scales, the wrong ruler, wrong numbers. Daniel says to Belshazzar, You’re going to die before the night’s done, your kingdom burned down and a new kingdom growing up to take its place.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“If you mean slaves, you only remember what they allowed you to remember. Even if Davis Bend was really as humane as you believe, they kept their misery to themselves, kept it a mystery to you. I promise that's true. Think of it as a great gift, a mark of affection. Their protection of your memory.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“I wonder what people talk about who've destroyed their lives with addictions other than books and politics and money and war.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay. A puff of breath, a moment’s lost attention, and it’s all gone, crashed to ruination, shards in the dirt. Then mankind retreats to the caves, leaving little behind but obelisks weathering to nubs like broken teeth, dissolving to beach sand.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“So, a little morphine, a good sweat, and a bowel movement—the cure for everything that ails you.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“The instant passed so fast, and when that happens, it goes for good and all you have is a slow lifetime to speculate on revisions.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“WILDE SAID, I hoped he could offer advice on ways Ireland might free itself. He has been the greatest revolutionary of the past century. —He was never a rebel. He was a businessman and a politician who believed the Constitution protected the capital of his class and culture above everything else.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“—Please, V says. Scribble. James opens his notebook and writes, The island was a separate place, situated partway between America and the moon. Some clear nights out with the telescope—moon full or gibbous—I felt about equidistant between the sharp-edged craters and the sparkling lights of America across the harbor. I knew that off the island very particular rules and laws and customs about skin color and blood degree applied, that the entire stretch of country from ocean to ocean was a strange place with a very strict borderline, and that I didn’t exactly fit on either side of it. Then across the bottom of the page—in a larger, more swooping hand—he writes: The island felt like home to a degree I’ve never experienced before or since.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“It does your mind good to talk to people different from you.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“It is a frightful thing to drop out of one's place in the world and never find it again. I try very hard to keep my memory green and thus by sympathy live anew, or if not anew, aright, which is more to the point, much more.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“I don't even know whether past feelings and memories deserve any respect at all. Maybe they're no more important than a pinch of pain from an injury decades old. Feelings and memories rise and pass every day, like the weather. Only important at the moment. Why not just notice them and let them go?”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She's still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she'll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope. She sees me and backs away in horror while I try to explain why I made the choices I made.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“I don't know facts, and probably there aren't any to know. Whatever crazy thing people want to believe, that's what they call it, a fact.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“Whether you pick well or poorly, the act of choosing carries grief. Leaves you wondering, years later, what life might have been had you chosen differently. . . . Or even wishing you'd simply paused, taken a long, deep breath. Not allowed the personal moment and the pattern of your family and your stupid culture to shove you two-handed from behind, forcing you to stumble unbalanced into the future”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“Their moral position in converting from slave holders to champions of freedom was about like a house cat on a cold night scooting through a closing door just before the latch clacks shut. But sometimes timing is all. A brief moment of history, less than a deep breath, becomes the difference between inside and outside.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina