The past is a stronger ...

The past is a stronger influence in the South. But I think everywhere you have this sense that the world changes faster than you can accommodate yourself to. Looking back and seeing how you got where you are is a useful way to combat disorientation.
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 Charles Frazier

Quotes from the same author

I was 46 when 'Cold Mountain' came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm.
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 Charles Frazier
I remember my father checking on a mountain kid who hadn't been coming to school. My father had this beautiful Harris tweed overcoat. He came back with a knife cut all down one side. The parents had told him it was none of his business why their son wasn't going to school.
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 Charles Frazier
While writing Cold Mountain, I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic.
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 Charles Frazier
A lizard in the spring - hear his darling sing. A bird with wings to fly - go back to his darling weep and moan till he dies. A mole in the ground - root a mountain down.
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 Charles Frazier
...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.
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 Charles Frazier