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

Contentment is mostly a matter of talking yourself into believing that God will not strike you too hard for leaning in the direction of your hungers.

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

Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don't just survive. Celebrate.

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.

But I believe the words entered me and changed me and still work in me. The words eat me and sustain me. And when I'm dead and in a box in the dark dark ground, and all my various souls have died and I am nothing but insensible bones, something in the marrow will still feel yearning, desire persisting beyond flesh.

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.