Favourite descriptions of characters

[kelby_lake]

Here's mine, from The Return of The Native: Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman.

[bIGwIRE]

This one, from chapter 42 of Ernest Hemingway's, For Whom the Bell Tolls, has always made me smile.

"His gray face had a look of decay. His face looked as though it were modeled from the waste material you find under the claws of a very old lion."

[cafolini]

Aphrodite was the model woman of Olympus. She was replaced by the Romans with a vegetable, the vestal virgin, the model woman.

[Ser Nevarc]

Poor, poor Professor Pnin. :(

[prendrelemick]

"- a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity, by giving it the strong character of pride and ill-nature. She was not a woman of many words: for unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas."


No one can give with one hand whilst taking with the other quite like Jane Austin

[kelby_lake]

"- a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity, by giving it the strong character of pride and ill-nature. She was not a woman of many words: for unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas."


Oooh, Austen's being a bit of a cow there :D