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

From my childhood, I remember a tiny old woman named Mary, made pale and almost translucent by time. Mary's childhood memories extended back to the confusing and violent finale of the Civil War, and she told stories of brutal murders in those days and refused to name some of the killers, as if dead men might still be prosecuted in the late 1950s.

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

Surely it is a sin to reject the few gifts we are given. Be happy in the flash of time granted to us or hurt forever.

I had never taken creative writing classes. Hadn't even considered it.

Ask her what she craved, and she'd get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.