Charles Finch > Charles's Quotes

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Are you going to give a speech?' she asked gaily.

He gave a choked laugh. 'Of course not,' he said. 'Not for ages.'

'My cousin Davey gave one on his very first day!' ...

'In the Lords, I remember. It was about how he didn't like strawberry jam.'

'Be nice, Charles! It was a speech about fruit importation, which I admit devolved into something of a tirade.' She couldn't help but laugh. 'Still, you could talk about something more important.'

'Than jam? Impossible. We mustn't set the bar too high, Jane.”
― Charles Finch, The Fleet Street Murders

“The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.”
― Vikram Chandra

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

“How dreadful the knowledge of the truth can be
When there’s no help in truth.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I get a warm feeling among my books.”
― Anthony Powell

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
― Haruki Marukami

“I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
― Mark Twain

“To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.

Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It’s definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so.

For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. There’s no page of prose in existence that its author can’t improve after it’s been in a drawer for a week. The same is true on the macro level – every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that I’m amazed I ever struggled with them.

Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling – you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever. But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding more readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them?”
― Charles Finch

“I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.”
― Norman Mailer

“I thought, too, about time. How fleet it is, and how certain, and like death how indifferent to our commentary upon it. Once not long before we had been boys and girls, and soon we would be middle-aged, thickening with rueful pleasure toward the thinness of old age.”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“And as I gazed up at the implacable black of the sky, my body warm from the bed but my face chilled, I thought of the terrible truth we all know, somewhere in our souls: that there has never been a shred of evidence that life goes beyond life. Nobody has sent back word. There is nothing. That does not mean there is nothing. But there is nothing.”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“There is nobody as hopelessly vulgar as a British aristocrat...”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door.”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“When you're finally a grown-up, one of the things you find is that there are no grown-ups.”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“The two things, love and snow, that make the world look fresh again”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“The river was glossy, narrow, and quick, a beautiful green color, with the white and maroon striped college punts strung along the near bank. .... The sun, westering, heavy, and hazy, was in those great final throes of energy before the sky whitens and clears, and evening comes. I stood and watched it. That immense body, dying trillions of feet away from me, still warming my face with its steady insensate chemistries.”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“Great events make me quiet and calm—it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.”
― Charles Finch, An Old Betrayal

“If you look for endings you can always find one, but I truly felt as if I had used up the last of my youth, if youth is that finite stage of life when it all feels expeditionary, inexact.”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“What fools American can be for England”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“‎He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.”
― Charles Finch, A Stranger in Mayfair

“The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city…”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting for the results.”
― Charles Finch

“The truth was that I didn't know my own mind. Just as you might move into a house and in the scatterbrained days of unpacking leave a broom in some corner, where it remains until someone uses it and then returns it to that corner, now knowing that it was there by casual chance, until slowly that corner becomes its hallowed place, where you can always find the broom - just as all traditions begin as accidents, how the borders of countries are formed, how we marry, how we make friends and children - so, until Oxford, had I lived, within a sequence of non decisions, and yet with the same misdirected conviction of intentionality with which humans infuse their errors and felicities alike.”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“There's nowhere that life feels more eternal, your dimwit youth more important, than Paris.”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.”
― Iris Murdoch

“I guess the lesson is you can’t go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can.”
― Charles Finch