...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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the pain of loss within the natural order of life, where parents dying before their children creates a deep emotional distress.
In this quote, Charles Frazier contemplates the inherent order in nature that dictates that parents usually pass away before their children. This natural progression, while a part of life, can bring about profound grief, especially for those who are left behind, highlighting the painful reality of losing loved ones and the harshness of life’s design, where fortunate individuals may find themselves facing the sorrow of becoming orphaned.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a funeral to express the pain of losing a parent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?
No advocate of reason can claim the right to force his ideas on others. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others. No rational society, no co-operation, no agreement, no understanding, no discussion are possible among men who propose to substitute guns for rational persuasion.
Nineteen thousand children [are] dying every day. Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they're far away? I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference.
Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.
Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.
I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness.
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes Beholds his hereditary skies.
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