#personal descriptions

“His mouth would have given despair to even the drollest of fools; it was a mouth made for frowns and scowls and sharply worded commands, all thin pale lips and clenched muscles, a mouth that had forgotten how to smile and had never known how to laugh.”

“She dressed in draped or trailing clothes in strong jewel colors - garnet-red, sapphire, deep green, or amethyst - mostly with fringes, hung with strings of beads she made herself, and she moved slowly, straight-backed, head held high.”

“She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child’s astonished disappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door.”

“One might have fancied he had talked [his hair] off; and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.” 

“His jeans were patched with bits of the American flag, and he wore a wisp of a goatee and a single long braid which, now that was bald on top, made it seem that his hair had somehow slipped several inches backward on his head.”

“The other girls, two Miss Beauforts were just such young ladies as may be met with, in at least one family out of three, throughout the kingdom; they had tolerable complexions, showy figures, an upright decided carriage and an assured look; -- they were very accomplished and very ignorant, their time being divided between such pursuits as might attract admiration, and those labours and expedients of dexterous ingenuity, by which they could dress in a style much beyond what they ought to have afforded; they were some of the first in every change of fashion -- and the object of all, was to captivate some man of much better fortune than their own.”

“Her hair, her clothes, her incoherent gestures, her strangely untutored mannerisms, all combined against her looks and discounted them.”