Charles Finch > Quotes

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

“Her strength was in the integrity of her actions; she never compromised what she believed she ought to do.”
― Charles Finch, A Beautiful Blue Death

“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

“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 two things, love and snow, that make the world look fresh again”
― 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

“...It had been a perfect nap -- the sort a man runs into now and again by chance...”
― Charles Finch, A Beautiful Blue Death

“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

“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

“...men lived and died all the time by the peculiarities of their soul, which they could never expect one another to understand.”
― Charles Finch, A Burial at Sea

“There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.

The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?

The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. “Breaking Bad” kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of “Freedom,” or “My Brilliant Friend,” or “Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.”
― Charles Finch

“Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door.”
― 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

“The hardest part of losing a person, Charles, is that grief is only an absence. There is nowhere to go to touch it.”
― Charles Finch, The Woman in the Water

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

“the boredom of childhood is different, richer and more special than the boredom of adulthood,”
― Charles Finch, A Beautiful Blue Death

“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

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

“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

“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

“In a way it was the same impulse as wishing to be a detective: to know everything; to understand everything; to experience everything.”
― Charles Finch, An Extravagant Death

“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

“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

“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, The Fleet Street Murders

“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

“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