Charles Frazier Quotes

I believe that when an elder dies, a library is burned: vast sums of wisdom and knowledge are lost. Throughout the world libraries are ablaze with scant attention.

I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other.

We're trying to let people see what their grandfather told them about.

People used to grow up in small communities where folk wisdom was passed down. But we don't live there anymore. We can't go next door to your aunt and ask her for the answers.

Whether as living humans or as mythological figures, ancestors have always played an important role in the African popular and literary imagination. Sometimes, as in Amos Tutuola's famous short novels, they directly influence events. More often, as in the works of Chinua Achebe, both living and dead ancestors are sages offering valuable advice.

The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man's intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one.

Proverbs were anterior to boots, and formed the wisdom of the vulgar, and in the earliest ages were the unwritten laws of morality.

The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, and so are you.

Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he knows nothing but what has passed under his own eyes.

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher. A community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.

The consciousness of being borne up by a spiritual tradition that goes back for centuries gives one a feeling of confidence and security in the face of all passing strains and stresses.

We measure our presence in generations; we cannot dig down ten thousand years and find our bones. Our arrival is scribed upon the line of history; it does not drift upon the winds of story, or float upon the shrouds of myth. We are still explorers and discoverers, seeking meaning through movement and examination. But we are coming to a time of listening. Our sweat and breath are now upon this land. Voices rise up, and we begin to hear the echoes in the stones.

Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion. In some cases, family stories told by grandparents to little grandchildren. When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. Everybody comes from somewhere.

The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion.

Stories are the most primitive and purest form of communication.

Because (grandparents) are usually free to love and guide and befriend the young without having to take daily responsibility for them, they can often reach out past pride and fear of failure and close the space between generations.

They (fables) teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches.

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation, neither are they transmitted by book learning. The mystic tradition, any mystic tradition, is of a similar nature, that is, it is dependent on direct perception, a 'knowledge' as permanent as the faculty for receiving it.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember.

It’s not about keeping up the population, it’s about passing on who we are and what we've learned, so things keep going. So we don’t just end.

If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.

It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.

Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.