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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“At the beginning I had been delighted to hear that I was considered an invalid and that I was going to be sent to stay with her for two months. When I told my Aunt Lavinia she said, “I’ll cross my fingers for you, darling,” and I had no idea what she meant. At that time I was convinced that there was nothing worse in life than being at my boarding-school; but from the first moment I walked through Great Granny Webster’s huge forbidding black front door, which had a hideous stained-glass covered porch full of potted plants that had to be watered day and night by Richards, I was starting to revise this opinion.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster

“The man's nose was sharp, like a knife, and his lips were plump and wrinkled. There were dark circles below his silver eyes.”
― Cedric Ennis, Eyes of the Watcher

“As boys they were husky. As men they are bulky. They loom like monoliths. They are chainsaw art. As Diz and Gusty lumbered across the yard, strong bulwark guts atop leg beams, they talked. Their thin exquisite lips barely moved. Their handsome wind-whipped faces were impassive in the shadow of billed caps. They had survived their father by sticking together. They never discussed the past. To speak about the way their father, Sport, had treated them would be like grabbing an electric fence. (220)”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“Habits can be changed. Character cannot.
You can train yourself to wake up early, eat healthy, or quit smoking — but an evil heart stays evil. A cheating, lying person will always be just that.
The biggest mistake people make is thinking they can change someone’s character. They confuse habits with character.
One is behavior. The other is the soul”
― Alex Haditaghi

“I arrived at the party with a bottle of wine, a log of cheese, and a novel in translation by a writer whose books I'd seen on bookshop displays.”
― Aysegül Savas, The Anthropologists

“She was very small, which was a surprise each time we saw her, as if she had sprung out of a fairytale. She had bright blue eyes and wore theatrical clothes in unexpected combinations—canvas and silk, velvet and plastic beads. At first I had taken her outfits as a sign of eccentricity, or an artistic sensibility, but she was simply childish. She delighted in life.”
― Aysegül Savas, The Anthropologists

“All six-plus feet of him were decked out in a long blue coat over a slim suit with mother-of-pearl buttons – stylish but slightly askew, as if he’d just come from a formal event and was in the process of undressing on his way home. Pinned to the lapel of his coat was a small golden W.
He stood with his feet wide apart and hands stuffed into his trouser pockets, leaning casually against the doorframe as if he had spent half his life standing in that spot and couldn’t think of a place he felt more at home. As if he himself owned Crow Manor and the Crows were merely his dinner guests.”
― Jessica Townsend, Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow

“The man's oratory could kill flies in midair”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“I saw him walk away down Gran Via, barely a sketch of a little man sheltering himself in a drab raincoat that flapped in the wind like a ragged flag.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“She stands with her chin tucked into her turtleneck, her arms crossed over her chest and a spiky sort of frustration draped over her weary shoulders.”
― Safa Ahmed, The Girlfriend Act

“Houses, he supposed, like human personalities, contained anomalous corners that refused to fit in with the rest of the general pattern. In her housekeeping habits Nora was like a brutal serial murderer who nevertheless when to Mass every morning and never forgot her mother's birthday.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“... it seemed to Max that what people kept in their refrigerators was every bit as indicative of their personalities as what they kept in their shelves.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace