“Grief is personal. It isn’t something you can share, like a box of chocolates. It is yours and yours alone. A spiked steel ball chained to your ankle. A coat of nails around your shoulders. A crown of thorns. No one else can feel your pain. They cannot walk in your shoes because your shoes are full of broken glass and every time you try and take a step forward it rips your soles to bloody shreds. Grief is the worst kind of torture and it never ends. You”
― The Hiding Place
― The Hiding Place
“John Varey Nicholson was stupid; yet, stupider men than he are now sprawling in Parliament, and lauding themselves as the authors of their own distinction.”
― The Body Snatcher
― The Body Snatcher
“People say time is a great healer. They're wrong. Time is simply a great eraser. It rolls on and on regardless, eroding our memories, chipping away at those great big boulders of misery until there's nothing left but sharp little fragments, still painful but small enough to bear.”
― The Hiding Place
― The Hiding Place
“To be astonished at everything, of course, is silly, while to be astonished at nothing is much more handsome, and for some reason is recognized as a good form. But surely it's not like that in reality. In my opinion, it's much sillier to be astonished at nothing than to be astonished at everything. And what's more: to be astonished at nothing is almost the same thing as to respect nothing. And a silly man is not capable of showing respect.”
― Bobok
― Bobok
“I've learnt some Things. Like the way friendship can be just as intense, beautiful and endless as romance. Like the way there's love everywhere around me - there's love for my friends, there's love for my paintings, there's love for myself.”
― Loveless
― Loveless
Charles’s 2025 Year in Books
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