Cold Mountain Quotes

“She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, 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 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, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. 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 go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear...And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter."
"I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't see why not you."
"Why not me?”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“What you have lost will not be returned to you; it always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on, or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“...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 only left with your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“[No] matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“That's just pain she said. It goes eventually. And when it's gone, there's no lasting memory. Not the worst of it anyway. It fades. Our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It's a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“I know I don't need him, but I think I want him.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“What I'm certain I don't want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of Creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift, but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument that life did not just happen.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“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, Cold Mountain

“She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“Verbs. All of them tiring.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“That's not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn't suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“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. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“They say this war is a cloud over the land! But they make the weather and then they stand in the rain and say, ‘Shit, it’s raining!”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“Our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It's a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“Bleak as the scene was, though, there was growing joy in Inman's heart. He was nearing home; he could feel it in the touch of thin air on skin, in his longing to see the lead of hearth smoke from the houses of people he had known all his life. People he would not be called upon to hate or fear. He rose and took a wide stance on the rock and stood and pinched down his eyes to sharpen the view across the vast propect to one far mountain. It stood apart from the sky only as the stroke of a poorly inked pen, a line thin and quick and gestural. But the shape slowly grew plain and unmistakable. It was to Cold Mountain he looked. He had achieved a vista of what for him was homeland.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“Ruby said there were many songs that you could not say anybody in particular had made by himself. A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“I consider it a mutual duty, that we owe to each other, to communicate in a spirit of the utmost frankness and candor. Let it ever be done with unlocked hearts.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“...she knew in her heart that nature has a preference for a particular order: parents die, then children die. But it was a harsh design, offering little relief from pain, for being in accord with it means that the fortunate find themselves orphaned.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“the path to contentment was to abide by one's own nature and follow it's path.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“The man had asked, Why do you want sheep? The wool? Meat? Monroe's answer had been, For the atmosphere.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“If I had a brother in jail and one in Georgia, I'd try to bust the one out of Georgia first.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain