The Last Enchantments Quotes

“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

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

“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

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

“Once in a while dancing is immaculate, a perfection: you understand why raves exist: when you’ve timed the drinks correctly and they lift your mood and your energy, the songs are ones you all know, and you look around at the girls, their happy lost faces, their beautiful bare stomachs, their jangly long earrings, something limbic, their skin just damp with sweat to the touch, the whole thing…”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“What fools American can be for England”
― 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

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

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

“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

“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 are times in life when the weather and the landscape seem suddenly as if they’re for you alone.”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“I thought, too, about time. How fleet it is, and how certain, and like death how indifferent to our commentary upon it.”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“In a fit of ambition I would start The Rainbow or Lord Jim, books I carried around school in the hopes that someone might ask me what I was reading, and which perhaps I thought would inaugurate my career as, what, a grown up? A thinker? I’m not sure.”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“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