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Thirteen Moons QUOTES

Thirteen Moons QUOTES

1 " ...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

2 " Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots. "

― Charles Frazier , Thirteen Moons

3 " It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well. "

― Charles Frazier , Thirteen Moons

4 " Literacy: Blessing? Or curse? "

― Charles Frazier , Thirteen Moons

5 " 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

6 " You never know when somebody will pull you to them. "

― Charles Frazier , Thirteen Moons

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " 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

19 " 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

20 " 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