The September Society Quotes

“I've had my wild times now and then — more than my share perhaps — and I don't think I'll give them up, because I like them too well.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“There was a smile upon his face, that mostly happy but slightly sad smile people have when they go back to a place they have loved.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was . . . There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it on the way to celebrate the boat race, a magic that came from ignoring it a thousand times a day and then noticing its overwhelming beauty when you came out of a tiny alley and it caught you unexpectedly. A library--it didn't sound like much, but it was what made Oxford itself. The greatest library in the world.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“Any Englishman who has left this island for the wider empire can tell you that terrible things are done in the name of the Queen, bless her.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“There were the same narrow, darkened streets, the same low-lit pubs with their constant suggestion of imminent violence, the same ragpickers and children turning cartwheels for halfpence.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“Lenox’s blood chilled. He understood very little of what Butler was saying, but here was tangible proof of what they had known from the start: that this Society was capable of murder.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“But the larger question loomed. What was the nature of the history between Payson’s father and his old battalion mates that it had such force twenty years into the future? That ostensibly reasonable men would kill for it?”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“He refused to say. All night long his refrain seemed to be ‘I wish I could tell you that, young Mr. Payson, but I cannot. For your own sake and mine.’ He must have said just those words six or seven times.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“So for the walking boots and the walking stick to have been so heavily used was out of the ordinary, and for him to put them on the armchair was doubly out of the ordinary. After all, why not just leave them by the door for the scout to clean?”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“It was quick thinking. I have all the admiration in the world for the lad, I have to say. We know as well that he specifically sent down to the scout before he left, asking that his room remain undisturbed!”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“For his tears were entirely genuine, born out of a grief that surpassed not only words but the years of upbringing that had taught him to keep a stiff upper lip.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“He didn’t know how many more small moments of her goodness, of her strength and intelligence and well-ordered generosity, he could take.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“Ashen and dismayed, one of his two best friends recently dead, he seemed worlds away from the jovial and high-spirited young man Lenox had met in Lincoln’s Grove Quad less than a week ago. There was no fight in him—at the moment, anyway”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“There’s no question about it. Unless James Payson and Peter Wilson’s regimental training encompassed a uniform lesson on the proper way to commit suicide, they were both murdered.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“Above all it was eerie that James and George Payson’s deaths were so similar: both bodies found in public fields, their bodies mauled, their lives over at the age of twenty.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“Taken together, the years of that era had added up to a gradual reclamation of rights that was on par with the Magna Carta.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“It’s not your fault that there are madmen in the world. It’s not your fault that somebody killed that poor boy in Oxford.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“Red. He had been in India—with Lysander, with Butler, with Payson. What could be more likely than that they would delegate a murder, give the order, and watch it done as they had so many times?”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“A picture was forming in Lenox’s mind of Dabney’s character. Solid, proud, middle class, and above all intelligent— that was the part of his personality that everybody from Hatch to Stamp had mentioned.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“Yes, I’d reckon he knows every secret about the British government that’s worth the having. My brother described him to me once as the most dangerous man to cross in all of Whitehall.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“The only thing that seemed clear was that if Lysander was a criminal, he was an exceptionally level-headed one, exceptionally cool. There was little emotion in him. If he was a criminal, Lenox knew, and shuddered to think it, he would be capable of nearly anything.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“But here again the line separating friendship and love was unclear, and he couldn’t decipher her feelings, usually so plain to him. He wondered for the thousandth time about the man in the long gray coat whom he had seen visiting her, and for the thousandth time reproached himself for his vulgar curiosity.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“Like many favors, it had bound the two people involved a little tighter, and Jenkins had made it plain that he was happy to lend a hand now and then where he could,”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“few minutes later they parted. Lenox thought of her, all alone over the past days with the terrible secret of her love and its defeat, aching to help, unequipped by her upbringing or her experience in the world to cope with her emotions. And felt at once a great pity for and admiration of her.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“What I cannot forgive myself for is letting him leave when I met him at Lincoln College, Mr. Lenox. I keep repeating the scene in my mind, and it’s beyond my comprehension that I could have let my poor George walk away from my embrace when he looked so pale,”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“Before him was a book he had borrowed from Andy Scratch, called The Heroes of Punjab. It told the story of the Anglo-Sikh wars, which were by now about twenty years in the past. One chapter briefly mentioned that the September Society had been created after the war by the surviving lead officers of the forces there during the period. The Society maintained close bonds, according to the book.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“There you take me into deeper waters. It’s difficult to gauge whether the cat was merely used to conceal a message, or whether it was in itself a message—to”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“That’s correct, Mr. Lenox, you’re correct. You see, in the first place, I wouldn’t want to go to the police. But in the second place, I think the police would have laughed. I know you won’t laugh.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“She was a pretty and lovable but perhaps not a beautiful woman, with wide, intelligent, peaceful eyes and a smiling mouth that ran pink and red depending on the weather. She rarely dressed inside the fashion, yet always managed to look fashionable, and while there were those in London society who condemned her curling, unostentatious hair as dull, there were others who thought it her best asset. Lenox, of course, stood with this latter group.”
― Charles Finch, The September Society

“And while he was looking forward to lunch—and while he took pleasure in examining his new book—he could not rid himself of the question he had been asking himself for weeks, as well as that entire morning: How on God’s green earth was he supposed to ask one of his oldest friends, Lady Jane Grey, to be his wife?”
― Charles Finch, The September Society