Excerpt from "Thirteen Moons" by Charles Frazier

"I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world to one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they've been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they've passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still harmless."

Charles Frazier, "Thirteen Moons"