Charles Finch Quotes & Sayings

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

What fools American can be for England — Charles Finch

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

Her strength was in the integrity of her actions; she never compromised what she believed she ought to do. — Charles Finch

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

then, why he saw so much of Leigh, and — Charles Finch

The two things, love and snow, that make the world look fresh again — 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 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

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

Men lived and died all the time by the peculiarities of their soul, which they could never expect one another to understand. — Charles Finch

He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them. — Charles Finch

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

There's nowhere that life feels more eternal, your dimwit youth more important, than Paris. — Charles Finch

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

There is nobody as hopelessly vulgar as a British aristocrat ... — Charles Finch

Suddenly Dallington burst into speech. 'Listen, Lenox - I want to apologize...'

Lenox waved a dismissive hand. 'You're young,' he said. 'There are many lessons before you, some harder than this one... All too often things are blurry, though, John. It's the way of the world. Humans are blurry creatures, — Charles Finch

Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door. — Charles Finch

When you're finally a grown-up, one of the things you find is that there are no grown-ups. — Charles Finch

When you became a student at Oxford you realized both your own mortality, in the flow of this near-millennium of students, and also the small particle of immortality that attaches to you when you begin to belong to an immortal place. — Charles Finch

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

It had been a perfect nap
the sort a man runs into now and again by chance ... — Charles Finch

The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city ... — Charles Finch

When you're my age, you'll see that it is wiser to make your own decisions than let time make decisions for you. — Charles Finch

I guess the lesson is you can't go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can. — Charles Finch

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