And it was pointless...to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell...for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is to go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you.

— Charles Frazier

And she [Ada] thought momentarily that she ought to worry about losing her beauty, about having become brown and stringy and rough. And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life.

— Charles Frazier

Back then, he'd have to leave at the end of August for the start of school, so the week before Labor Day became its own tiny season of gloom, like a hundred Sunday nights crowded together.

— Charles Frazier

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

— Charles Frazier

From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and howls. Nevertheless, the beautiful and familiar tune was impervious to poor performance, and Unman thought how painfully young it sounded, as if the pattern of its notes allowed no room to imagine a future clouded and tangled and diminished.

— Charles Frazier

Hard-boiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learned their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

— Charles Frazier

He said, I've been coming for you on a hard road. I'm never letting you go. Never.

— Charles Frazier

He saw with sorrow that hers was a life he could step right into and keep working at hard from tonight until death. If he allowed himself to ponder it for a minute, he saw all the world hanging over the girl like the deadfall to a trap, ready to drop and crush.

— Charles Frazier

He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.

— Charles Frazier

He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been burned out of him, but he was yet walking.

— Charles Frazier