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Varina QUOTES

Varina QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along. "

― Charles Frazier , Varina

3 " 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

4 " If every generation helps the next take one step up, imagine where we might all be someday. "

― Charles Frazier , Varina

5 " 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

6 " the you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are. "

― Charles Frazier , Varina

7 " 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

8 " —Oh, Mary said, life is mostly just what happens. Choice or chance or fate, gods or not. Like it or not. Things happen, we do what we think is in our best interests or just convenient, and then we live with the consequences. "

― Charles Frazier , Varina

9 " Humans are inhuman, whether it’s by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal. "

― Charles Frazier , Varina

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " Remembering doesn’t change anything—it will always have happened. But forgetting won’t erase it either. "

― Charles Frazier , Varina

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " After years of loss and reflection, your old deluded decisions click together like the works of a watch packed tight within its case--many tiny, turning, interlocking wheels....the force of every decision transferring gear to gear, wheel to wheel, each one motivating a larger energy going in no direction but steep downward to darkness at an increasing pitch. And then one morning the world resembles Noah's flood, stretching unrecognizable to the horizon and you wonder how you go there. One thing for sure, it wasn't from a bad throw of dice or runes or an unfavorable turn of cards. Blame falls hard and can't be dodged by the guilty. "

― Charles Frazier , Varina

17 " So, a little morphine, a good sweat, and a bowel movement—the cure for everything that ails you. "

― Charles Frazier , Varina

18 " Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619. "

― Charles Frazier , Varina

19 " 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

20 " 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. "

― Charles Frazier , Varina