Character Description Quotes

“She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.”
― David Nicholls, One Day

“Oh, he did look like a deity – the perfect balance of danger and charm, he was at the same time fascinating and inaccessible, distant because of his demonstrated flawlessness, and possessing such strength of character that he was dismaying and at the same time utterly attractive in an enticing and forbidden way.”
― Simona Panova, Nightmarish Sacrifice

“He ... boasted an unassuming mustache, which was perched atop his upper lip cautiously, as though it were slightly embarrassed to be there and would like to slide away and become a sideburn or something more fashionable.”
― Gail Carriger, Etiquette & Espionage

“Once Addie let someone in, she was impossible to forget. There was something about her that crawled inside a person and built a nice comfy home there, her goodness expanding until it filled every limb.”
― Kasie West, Split Second

“Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine; she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments, but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature; nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original; she used to repeat sounding phrases from books; she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment, but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“It was a compound of self-reliance, hard knocks, heart hunger, unceasing work, and generosity. There was no form of suffering with which the girl could not sympathize, no work she was afraid to attempt, no subject she had investigated she did not understand. These things combined to produce a breadth and depth of character altogether unusual.”
― Gene Stratton Porter, A Girl of the Limberlost

“Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“If you're not who you want to be, at least act like who you want it be. - Bud”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

“the kind of person took milk in his tea on one day and decided against it on the next.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“Phyllida's hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Show Pleasant Riderhood a Wedding in the street, and she only saw two people taking out a regular license to quarrel and fight. Show her a Christening, and she saw a little heathen personage having a quite superfluous name bestowed upon it, inasmuch as it would be commonly addressed by some abusive epithet; which little personage was not in the least wanted by anybody, and would be shoved and banged out of everybody's way, until it should grow big enough to shove and bang. Show her a Funeral, and she saw an unremunerative ceremony in the nature of a black masquerade, conferring a temporary gentility on the performers, at an immense expense, and representing the only formal party ever given by the deceased. Show her a live father, and she saw but a duplicate of her own father, who from her infancy had been taken with fits and starts of discharging his duty to her, which duty was always incorporated in the form of a fist or a leathern strap, and being discharged hurt her. All things considered, therefore, Pleasant Riderhood was not so very, very bad.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

“Standing at the original Victorian counter was a man in a long black leather coat. His hair had been grown to counteract its unequivocal retreat from the top of his head, and was fashioned into a mean, frail ponytail that hung limply down his back. Blooms of acne highlighted his vampire-white skin.”
― Julia Stuart, The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise

“The only talents he possessed were delusions of adequacy.”
― Jodi Taylor, The Nothing Girl

“Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“The uncle and cousin seem nice, but the aunt is a bit of a shock. Whith her hair dyed bright red, she looks like Ronald McDonald's post-menopausal sister. Who has let herself go.”
― Brian Malloy, Twelve Long Months

“The latter. She had a good run," Sook said, doing a little shrug. It was his usual response to death at Mapleshade, and it was a safe bet that he felt that way about himself. Like most twice-widowed, Korea-vet, nature-loving, gun-enthusiast, bilingual, weed-connoisseur great grandfathers of five, he'd lived a full life.”
― Lisa Lutz, Heads You Lose

“Simon Sparks was an oozing slug of a man poured neatly into a three-piece suit.”
― C. Robert Cargill, Dreams and Shadows

“His eyes were like a lion's, but Jack could not know this, for he had never seen a lion.”
― Chiara Kilian, The First Tale of the Tinners' Rabbits

“He was drinking Harriet's favourite, cold tea... not iced tea, but hot tea that had cooled. They liked him so much. They liked the way he talked when he talked and they liked his quiet when he was quiet.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread

“The man to whom the voice belonged stepped in front of him. Though frail and worn, he had a largeness of presence that reminded Jack of the squire, and yet made him feel much different towards him. His dress was night-coloured, but for a little square on his collar that was as white as his hair.”
― Chiara Kilian, The First Tale of the Tinners' Rabbits

“Unjudgmental and above reasoning, her voice could not offend, hurt, or be interpreted in the wrong way because in itself was the truth, a higher dimension of awareness that knew no limits or history except what was right then.”
― Ricardo L. Ogdon, A Pyramid Lake Story: Below the Surface: There is a secret hidden deep underneath Pyramid Lake

“A man shined to her left. He was called Lorenzo and he drank a hot chocolate with whole milk. He sipped it with fleshy, pink lips and
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gulped it down his large neck that seemed to be a kind of engine. The gulp went down his chest, where his muscles cooled after his calisthenics, and sunk somewhere behind the walls of his tight, tan stomach. He was a chess set of a man. He had burly knights as biceps, thick bishops as legs, healthy pawns as his troop of fingers, and the battlement of rooks as his fortified abs of stone.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“She’s wearing a red dress, inappropriately revealing. Her clothes always seem like a disguise, an attempt at masking her true identity – her self-loathing and low self-esteem. Ironically, this is all I see, and I can’t help but feel hopelessly sorry for her.”
― N.A. Cooper, Ripple Effect

“Libra smiled. It gave Will the impression he'd sent off a postal order for a booklet on Smiling for Beginners.”
― K.J. Charles, Slippery Creatures

“Melog was in the extreme. Dr Jones was not at all”
― Mihangel Morgan, Melog

“Beside him, very close beside him, was a gorgeous woman. She had masses of deep auburn hair and great violet eyes. She was not plump, yet she gave the impression of soft, rounded curves and comfortable hollows. She had an air of Mona Lisa, the Lady of Shalott. All her movements were slow with a lazy, languid indolence”
― Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

“The disk, of Swiss manufacture, unfolded into a tent whose vast interior defied belief; Less was fascinated by its pockets, air vents, rain flies; its stitching, netting, and circular Guggenheim ceiling. But, like the Swiss, it was neutral; it did not love him back”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

“Sure of his infallibility, he unzipped the insect mesh and let in a rowdy bachelorette party of mosquitoes that raided the human open bar”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

“Standing on the deck of a San Francisco ferryboat, in a gray suit so precisely the same colour as the fog that he seems (as in a not particularly scary movie) to be a ghostly floating head”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost