Cold Mountain Quotes

• Clambering up the Cold Mountain path, The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on: The long gorge choked with scree and boulders, The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass. The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain The pine sings, but there's no wind. Who can leap the world's ties And sit with me among the white clouds?

  Gary Snyder

  Rain, Clouds, Wind

  Gary Snyder (2010). “Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems”, p.46, Counterpoint Press

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• Cold Mountain Son
  Forever not change
  I live alone
  Beyond life death

  Hanshan

  Son, Forever, Mountain

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• Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.

  Charles Frazier

  Journey, Thinking

  Charles Frazier (2007). “Cold Mountain: A Novel”, p.71, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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

  Life, Knowing, Goes On

  Charles Frazier (2007). “Cold Mountain: A Novel”, p.421, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Men ask the way to Cold Mountain, Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.

  Hanshan

  Men, Mountain, Way

  Paul Kahn, Hanshan, Gary Snyder (1989). “Han Shan in English”, White Pine Pr

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• 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

  Wish, Wipe, Goes On

  Charles Frazier (2007). “Cold Mountain: A Novel”, p.258, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical

  Charles Frazier

  Character, Foul, Mark

  Charles Frazier (2007). “Cold Mountain: A Novel”, p.25, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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

  Spirit, Cases, Burned

  Charles Frazier (2007). “Cold Mountain: A Novel”, p.22, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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

  Mistake, Bird, Singing

  Charles Frazier (2007). “Cold Mountain: A Novel”, p.279, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?

  Jack Kerouac

  Clouds, White, Ties

  Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.20, Penguin

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• My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.

  Emily Bronte

  Rocks, Delight, Littles

  "Wuthering Heights".

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• 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

  Mind, Age, Literature

  Charles Frazier (2007). “Cold Mountain: A Novel”, p.328, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

  Emily Bronte

  Love, Mind, Pleasure

  Emily Bronte (1858). “Wuthering Heights”, p.72

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• 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

  Wish, Nerves, Want

  Charles Frazier (2007). “Cold Mountain: A Novel”, p.410, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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

  Taken, Space, Long

  Charles Frazier (1997). “Cold Mountain”, p.347, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• Needing and getting don’t seem likely to match up any time soon... What needs doing is mine to do.

  Charles Frazier

  Needs, Mines, Seems

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• 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

  Pain, Memories, Giving

  Charles Frazier (2007). “Cold Mountain: A Novel”, p.277, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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

  Brother, Past, Self

  Charles Frazier (2007). “Cold Mountain: A Novel”, p.422, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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

  Powerful, Air, Comforting

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

  Charles Frazier

  Regret, Names, Might

  Charles Frazier (1997). “Cold Mountain”, p.281, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• There is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Angel, Eye, Men

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ann Dexter Gordon (2006). “The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: When clowns make laws for queens, 1880-1887”, p.85, Rutgers University Press

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• Look at it this way: if you write the novel of 'Cold Mountain,' it costs exactly the same to produce and market as a novel set in a room. If you make the film, the disparity of costs is huge.

  Anthony Minghella

  Writing, Mountain, Way

  "Down from Cold Mountain". Interview with Andrew Pulver, www.theguardian.com. December 11, 2003.

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• 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.

  Charles Frazier

  Clever, Writing, Two

  "Week three: Charles Frazier on writing Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier, www.theguardian.com. September 30, 2011.

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• I was 46 when 'Cold Mountain' came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm.

  Charles Frazier

  Horse, Nice, House

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• Cold Mountain Buddhas Han Shan Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness be dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth.

  T. S. Eliot

  Death, Running, Laughter

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