

“There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.”
―
―

“Every time I think about that girl, my mind commits a sin.”
― The Accidental Siren
― The Accidental Siren

“How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow.
Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no — they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.”
― Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no — they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.”
― Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“Don't you see? The catastrophe is me. My very existence is an affront to everything that is natural and good.”
― Blood
― Blood

“When someone who badly needs something finds it, it isn’t an accident that brings it his way, but he himself, his own desire and necessity lead him to it.”
― Demian
― Demian
Charles’s 2024 Year in Books
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