“He had been a handsome man, when they married, fourteen years ago. A handsome, happy man, proud and kind, very good at his work. There had been a splendor to him, a wholeness.
That was gone. There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain.”

The House (p. 176)
Short fiction, Orsinian Tales (1976)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "He had been a handsome man, when they married, fourteen years ago. A handsome, happy man, proud and kind, very good at …" by Ursula K. Le Guin?

Ursula K. Le Guin292

American writer 1929–2018

Related quotes

“On the whole, the change had done Huxley a share of good. Death made him a handsomer man to deal with. You could talk to him now and he’d have to listen.”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl (1948)
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

“Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.”

Margaret Atwood book The Penelopiad

Source: The Penelopiad

“When she looked at him now, she couldn't help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

“His mother had been the world to him, and although she had done her best to prepare him, he had been too young to fully understand what death meant—until she was gone, and the great, raw, gaping hole in his heart could not be filled or patched or mended. He looked for her everywhere, even after he had been shown her body—looked and looked and she could not be found.”

Sarah Monette book The Goblin Emperor

Source: The Goblin Emperor (2014), Chapter 4, "The Funeral at the Ulimeire" (p. 48)

“It's not so much that I like him as a person God, but as a boy he's very handsome.”

Judy Blume (1938) American children's writer

Source: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

“He was a fine steady man, Juan Chicoy, part Mexican and part Irish, perhaps fifty years old, with clear black eyes, a good head of hair, and a dark and handsome face. Mrs Chicoy was insanely in love with him and a little afraid of him too, because he was a man, and there aren't very many of them, as Alice Chicoy had found out. There aren't very many of them in the world, as everyone finds out sooner or later.”

John Steinbeck book The Wayward Bus

Source: The Wayward Bus (1947), Ch. 1

“He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better.”

Charles Frazier book Cold Mountain

Source: Cold Mountain

“And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

“Curious, if we will reflect on it, this of having no books. Except by what he could see for himself, or hear of by uncertain rumor of speech in the obscure Arabian Desert, he could know nothing. The wisdom that had been before him or at a distance from him in the world, was in a manner as good as not there for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through so many lands and times, no one directly communicates with this great soul. He is alone there, deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness; has to grow up so,—alone with Nature and his own Thoughts. But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

“In eight years not a day has gone by when she hasn’t thought of him. She misses him and she wants him back. I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Ursula K. Le Guin292

Related quotes

Related topics