BODY TYPES, FRAMES, AND STATURES
of average or medium size or height
average, medium, middling, normal
having a smooth body
hairless
having a hairy body
hirsute, shaggy, furry, fuzzy
having a thick or somewhat stout build
stocky, thickset, heavyset, chunky, heavy-built, bulky, compact, beefy, burly
muscular
sinewy, well-built, solid, athletic, brawny, husky, mesomorphic, sturdy, robust, muscle-bound
having good posture
upright, straight, rigid, ramrod
having a flexible body
limber, supple, lithe, lithesome, lissome, pliant, agile, nimble, rubbery
not erect or upright
bent, stooped, bent over, slumped, hunched over
having the shoulders bent forward
round-shouldered, stoop-shouldered
large or big
hulking, gigantic, strapping, oversized, hefty, massive, elephantine, heavy-bodied, lumpish, looming, monstrous, a colossus, a goliath, a giant
having a large bone structure relative to one’s flesh
big-boned
small or little
slight, diminutive, tiny, undersized, small-boned, wee, a shrimp, a snip, a pipsqueak
tiny and slim (female)
petite
small or lean and supple
wiry, sinewy
short and pudgy
plump, chubby, rotund, tubby, blubbery, roly-poly, round-bodied, pyknic, endomorphic
fat
obese, stout, corpulent, overweight, portly, adipose, fattish, stoutish, fleshy, beefy, bloated, gross, a blimp, a tub of lard, having embonpoint
fat and short-winded
pursy
having loose or limp flesh
flabby, flaccid, soft, slack, irresilient, quaggy
having hanging flesh
pendulous, baggy, loppy, drooping, droopy, nutant
thin
slim, slender, slight, spare, skinny, ectomorphic, thin as a rail, bony, reedy, underweight, angular
thin and fit or with well-defined musculature
trim, lean, toned, buffed, buff, ripped, cut, having definition
elegantly or sleekly thin
willowy, svelte, lissome
delicately thin
wraith-like, sylph-like, fragile, wispy, undernourished
thin and large framed
rawboned
thin and worn-looking
haggard, gaunt, emaciated, shriveled, underfed, scrawny, scraggy
deathly thin
anorectic, anorexic, spectral, cadaverous, skeletal, consumptive, wasted away, emaciated, skin and bone
tall
tallish, long-limbed
tall and thin
gangling, gangly, rangy, long-limbed, loose-jointed, spindly, slab-sided, a beanpole, lanky
short
undersized, runty, runtish, dwarfish, bantam
short and fat
a butterball
short and heavy
squat, pudgy, fubsy (British), stumpy, like a fireplug
shapelessly short and thick
dumpy
broad-shouldered
square-shouldered, square-built
having a broad upper torso
barrel-chested
having a large belly
pot-bellied, paunchy, abdominous, swag-bellied, ventripotent, gorbellied (obsolete), beer-bellied
having a proportionally short upper body (or high waistline)
short-waisted
having large hips
broad in the beam, hippy
having thin hips
slim-hipped, narrow-hipped
having long arms and legs
long-limbed
having long legs
leggy
having shapely buttocks
callipygous, callipygian
having lardy buttocks
steatopygic, steatopygous
(of a woman) having imposing and stately beauty
statuesque, Junoesque, goddess-like
(of a woman) large and strong
Amazonian
(of a woman) attractively or gracefully thin
svelte, willowy, gracile, slender, slight
(of a woman) large and rounded
full-figured, developed, ample, opulent, full-blown
(of a woman) having large breasts
large-breasted, big-breasted, big-chested, bosomy, big-bosomed, buxom, busty, top-heavy, well-built, built, full-bosomed, well-endowed
(of a woman) having deep cleavage
bathycolpian
(of a woman) having a flat chest
flat-chested, small-breasted
(of a woman) having a full and shapely body
voluptuous, shapely, pneumatic, curvaceous, zaftig, Rubensian, Rubenesque, pleasingly plump
(of a woman) having a small waist
wasp-waisted, having an hourglass figure
HEAD, FACE, COMPLEXION, AND SKIN
extremely round-headed
trochocephalic
extremely short- or broad-headed
brachycephalic
extremely large-headed
macrocephalic
extremely long-headed
dolichocephalic, high-crowned
having a high or dome-like head with short hair
bullet-headed, domey
having well-defined or shapely facial features
fine-featured, chiseled, delicately sculptured, sculpturesque
having delicate, almost translucent-like facial features
porcelain
having thick (or thickened) features
blunt, coarse, heavy, gross
having thick features with wide lips and large eyes
frog-like
having a long face
horse-faced, horsey
having a round face
moon-faced
having a wide forehead and a narrow chin
heart-shaped face
having a small and pretty face
doll-faced
having a thin face with angular features
hatchet-faced, sharp-faced, gaunt, severe,
hollow-cheeked, with sunken cheeks
having a flat and round face
pie-faced, flat-faced
having a fat and expressionless face
pudding-faced
having a hook nose and protruding chin
having a nutcracker face
lined face
wrinkled, wizened, furrowed, creased, rugose
having heavy or drooping cheeks
jowly
having a pink or reddish face
pink-faced, rosy-faced, ruddy, florid, flushed, rubicund, rubescent, suffused, roseate
ruddy in a coarse way
blowzy, blowsy
looking crisply clean and fresh
well-scrubbed
having an open and guileless face
fresh-faced, sweet-faced
having an expressionless face
blank, unreadable, deadpan, inscrutable, masklike, vacant look, impassive, empty, poker-faced, stone-faced
face showing pain or a difficult life
pinched, hard-bitten
worn face
weather-beaten, weathered, haggard, withered, shriveled, rough, rugged-looking, craggy (features)
tight or tense face
taut, drawn, hardened, hard (features)
skull-like face
skull-faced, spectral, hollowed
having a fleshy face
puffy, bloated, jowly, heavy-jowled
having a concave face
push-faced, dish-faced
having an elfin face
impish, pixieish, mischievous
baby-faced
cherubic
looking worried or depressed
grim, grim-faced, gloomy, saturnine, with a February face
looking wholesomely neat and regular
clean-cut
smooth-skinned
lustrous, unwrinkled, shining, glowing, glabrous, flawless
having a healthfully rosy complexion
ruddy, rosy-cheeked, apple-cheeked, rubicund, rubescent
cracked, roughened, or reddened from wind or cold
chapped
having large pores
large-pored, grainy
aged skin
withered, shriveled, dried up, wizened, like parchment, puckered, cracked, shrunken
weathered skin
tough, leathery, leathern
having freckles
freckled, lenticular
having small spots or discolorations
mottled, blotchy, splotchy, splodgy (British), having a maple face (obsolete)
having warts
warty, verrucose
having pockmarks
pockmarked, pocked, pitted
pimply
papuliferous, eruptive, acned, broken out
glossy
shiny-faced
oily-skinned
oleaginous, greasy
pale
pallid, wan, chalky, pasty, blanched, doughy, etiolated, peaked, whey-faced
dark
swart, swarthy, dark-complexioned
white
alabaster, pearly, creamy, porcelain, milk white, translucent, light-complexioned
sunburned
sunburnt, tan, bronzed, brown, coppery
brown
cocoa, chocolate, coffee
beige-yellow
olive
black
coal black, ebony
yellowish
sallow, waxen, jaundiced, waxlike, parchment-colored, tallow-hued
reddish
ruddy, raw, blowzy, flushed, florid, suffused
blushing
flushing, mantled
reddish brown
liverish
bluish
cyanotic
black and blue
livid
spotted in coloring
mottled, blotched, liver-spotted
hair
tress, lock, strand, shock, hank, coil, tendril, curl, ringlet, swirl, tuft
having neatly coiffed or combed hair
kempt
hairy
hirsute, unshaven, shaggy, crinose
having no hair
hairless, bald, bald-headed, glabrous, depilous, a cueball
having little hair
balding, thin, thin on top, sparse, wispy, scant, thinning
attempt to cover a bald spot or receding hairline with strands of hair
comb-over
mid-forehead point formed by the hairline
widow’s peak
monk’s circular fringe or shaven crown
tonsure
having a full or bushy head of hair
mop-headed, mop top, lion-headed, leonine, thick-haired, luxuriant
having short hair
close-cropped, close-thatched, cropped, short-cropped
having very light or whitish hair (like spinning fiber)
towheaded
having soft and lustrous hair
silken-haired
having fine hair
fine-haired, thin-haired
hair with turns or twists
crinkly
hair in disorder
unkempt, messy, mussed up, unruly, tangled, ratty, tousled, rumpled, snarled, straggly
wild and thickly coiled (snake-like) hair
Medusa-like
long and loose
flowing
loose or streaming in the wind
windblown, flyaway
lacking body
lank, stringy, thin, flat
stiff
bristly, brushlike, en brosse
rough
bristly, bristling, scraggy, scrubby, coarse
with pointed tufts
spiky
in thick strands
ropy
formed into curls or ringlets
curled, crimped
formed into small and tight curls
frizzed, frizzed out, frizzy
given more body by combing toward the scalp
teased, back-combed
combed up toward the top of the head
upswept, swept back, raked back
dried (and usually given a fluffed shaping) with a blow dryer
blow-dried
cut in different lengths for a fuller look
layered
oiled
greased, slicked, slick, pomaded, brilliantined, plastered, pasted
matted patches of hair
elflocks
lock hanging at the front of the head
forelock
groomed curl of hair displayed against the forehead or side of the face
spit curl
curled lock of hair
ringlet
tuft of hair growing awry or that won’t lie flat
cowlick
curl or lock of hair worn in front of the ear
earlock, sidelock, sidecurl
dampened curl held with a hairpin or clip
pin curl
twisted or intertwined length of hair
braid, plait
woman’s hairstyle with a braid or braids “woven” close to the head and attached with pins
French braid
tight braid usually worn down the back of the head
pigtail, rat’s tail, rat tail
cinched lock of hair hanging loosely down the back of the neck or head
ponytail
hair divided into braids and worn flat against the scalp
cornrows
hairstyle cut short in the front and on the sides and left long in the back
mullet
knot of hair worn at the back (or on both sides) of the head
bun
tightly wound bun pulled into a knot low at the back of the head
chignon
short, layered hairstyle associated with character played by Jennifer Aniston on the television sitcom Friends
Rachel
knot of folded-under hair at the back of the head
French knot, French twist
knot of hair worn on the top of the head
topknot
wave set in lotioned or wet hair with a finger
finger wave
long and rope-like braids as worn by Rastafarians
dreadlocks, dreads
single long lock worn on a bare scalp
scalp lock
attachable woman’s hairpiece for creating a hanging length of hair down the back of the head
fall, extension
any attachable thick strand of hair for a woman’s coiffure
switch
front down-hanging hair cut evenly across the forehead
bangs, fringe
woman’s conical coil of hair worn at the back of the neck
Psyche knot
roll of hair combed up from the forehead or temples
roach
cylindrical roll of hair
puff
curl that is tubular
sausage curl
curl that is spiral
corkscrew curl
certain strands bleached or colored
highlighted, streaked, frosted, tinted, lightened, darkened
hairstyle in which the hair is chemically curled or waved
permanent wave, permanent, perm, cold wave
permanent wave that is looser and gives more body to the hair
body wave
hairstyle in which the (curly or frizzy) hair is chemically straightened and flattened or slightly waved
conk, process
given aligned soft waves (by means of a heated curling iron)
marceled
perm styling, popularized among African-Americans in the 1970s, that rolls or loosens curls
Jheri curl
hairstyle in which the hair is slicked back from either side to meet, at a part, or overlap behind
ducktail, duck’s ass, DA
hairstyle featuring spiky or irregularly chopped hair
punk
haircut created with use of a razor, as for a shaggy look or bob
razor cut
rounded cut (with no attention to sides) with hair shaped and hanging like an inverted bowl
bowl cut
short and brushlike haircut
crewcut, butch, burr-cut, buzz cut, brush-cut, Ivy League
short and brushlike haircut with a flattened top
flattop
short men’s hairstyle, brushed forward, with a horizontally straight cut fringe over the forehead
Caesar cut
short haircut that makes one’s ears appear large
crop-eared
hairstyle with a brushlike strip down the center of an otherwise shaved head
Mohawk
hairstyle in which the hair is a naturally round and bushy mass
Afro
hairstyle in which the hair shape widens above the head to a flat top but is progressively tapered (or “faded”) toward the ears
fade
hairstyle in which the brushed-up hair appears as a full and loose roll around the face
pompadour
woman’s choppy, layered coiffure in which the hair is cut in downward overlapping and uneven layers
shag
woman’s coiffure in which the hair is cut short and evenly all around the head
bob
woman’s coiffure in which the short cut is neither layered nor graduated
blunt cut
woman’s coiffure in which the hair is cut irregularly short toward the face and with the ears exposed
pixie, French cut
woman’s coiffure in which the hair is teased for a puffed-out look
bouffant
woman’s conical coiffure
beehive
woman’s coiffure with a rounded or cap-like top that is tapered at the back of the neck
mushroom
coiffure in which the usually shoulder-length hair is combed down and turned under or inward at the ends in a roll and with even bangs over the forehead
pageboy, Prince Valiant
woman’s coiffure with bangs and the unlayered hair at chin length
Buster Brown, cap cut
woman’s coiffure in which the combed-down hair is curled outward
flip
woman’s coiffure that is short in which the hair arcs over the forehead and forms a triangle at the back
wedge, Dorothy Hamill
woman’s coiffure in which the short and uneven-length curls are given feather-like ends
feather cut
woman’s coiffure that is close-cropped in layers and short in the back
shingle
woman’s coiffure in which the hair is combed or swept up toward the top of the head and held by pins or combs
upsweep, updo
woman’s coiffure in which the hair is combed back to form a long or vertical roll at the back of the head
French twist, French roll
woman’s coiffure (eighteenth century) with the hair worn in cylindrical rolls or puffs
pouf
artificial covering of (another’s or synthetic) hair
hairpiece, wig, postiche
weaving in of false or human hair on the scalp to compensate for thin hair
hairweave
man’s covering of hair over a bald spot
toupee, piece, rug
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century man’s wig often powdered and gathered at the back
periwig, peruke
woman’s fringe of hair or curls worn on the forehead
frisette (archaic)
free of facial hair
clean-shaven
adolescent facial hair
peach fuzz
downy
fuzzy (face or skin)
untrimmed facial hair (short of a mustache or beard)
unshaven, stubbly, stubbled, scraggy, bristly
soft or fine facial hair
downy
needing a shave
with a five-o’clock shadow
having a mustache
mustached, mustachioed (usually a long mustache)
mustache that is slight and thin
pencil mustache
narrow mustache under the middle of the nose
toothbrush mustache
thickly shaggy or droopy mustache
walrus mustache
thick mustache with long and curving ends
handlebar mustache, military mustache
curving and dressed mustache
waxed mustache
having a beard
bearded
beard covering most of the lower face
full beard, beaver
small chin beard or tuft
goatee
beard that is long and rectangular
patrician, square-cut beard
trim and pointed beard extending back to the ears
Vandyke, pickedevant
beard shaped like a pointed or broad spade
spade beard
pointed beard beginning at the lower lip
imperial beard
beard following the line of the chin
galways
whiskers extending below the ears
sideburns, burnsides, side-whiskers, sideboards
untrimmed sidelocks worn by male Orthodox Jews
payess
side-whiskers that become broader at the lower jaw
muttonchops, muttonchop whiskers, dundrearies
white
hoary, silvery, platinum, snow white
blond
blonde, blondish, straw-colored, flaxen-haired
golden blond
goldilocks
dull rather than bright blond
dirty blond
bleached blond
peroxide blond, bottled blond, drugstore blond
pale grayish blond
ash blond
black or brown
brunette, dark-haired, dark
black
jet, jet black, coal black, ebony
black and shiny
raven-haired
a mix of black and white
salt-and-pepper
brown
chestnut, wheaten, nut brown
drab brown
mouse-colored, mousy
light yellowish brown
sandy
reddish brown
auburn
red-haired
redheaded, a carrot top, ginger, gingery, titian
brownish red or brownish orange
coppery
reddish blond
strawberry blond
gray or partly gray
grizzled, graying, hoary, grizzly
dyed reddish or orangish brown
hennaed
dyed slightly bluish (to offset yellowed coloration)
having a blue rinse
having some long strands chemically lightened in color
streaked
having much of the hair chemically lightened for a two-tone effect
frosted
Eyes
clear-eyed
limpid
large-eyed
saucer-eyed, wide-eyed, fish-eyed
small-eyed
beady-eyed, piglike, porcine, ferret-like, ferrety
eyes wide apart
wide set, far set
eyes close together
close set
sunken eyes
hollow-eyed, deep set
bulging or protruding eyes
pop-eyed, banjo-eyed, prominent, protuberant, starting, exophthalmic, hyperthyroid, bug-eyed, proptosed, bulbous, goggle-eyed, starting
narrow-eyed
slit-eyed
lively eyes
bright-eyed, twinkle-eyed, flashing, luminous, beaming, glinting, glowing
having a hard, unflinching gaze
steely-eyed
expressionless eyes
flat, cold, dull-eyed, lusterless, blank, fish-like, glassy
blinking frequently (as a tic)
blinky-eyed, blinky
narrowed eyes
squinting, crinkled
having inwardly turned eyes
cross-eyed, cockeyed, strabismic
having outwardly turned eyes
walleyed, cockeyed, strabismic
squinting
cockeyed, strabismic
restless or moving eyes
shifting, shifty, darting, swivel-eyed
having soft and dark eyes
sloe-eyed
having large and innocent eyes
doe-eyed
moist or wet eyes
dewy-eyed, watery, aqueous, glistening, teary-eyed, rheumy-eyed, watery-eyed
having slanted eyes
slanty-eyed, sloe-eyed
having horizontally long or somewhat oval eyes
almond-eyed
having tired or half-closed eyes
heavy-lidded, sleepy-eyed, slumberous, slumbrous
motionless eyes
staring, glaring, transfixed, unblinking, glazed
reddened eyes
red-eyed, bloodshot, pink-veined
having weary or strained eyes
bleary-eyed, puffy-eyed
hoodlike upper lids or eyes looking half-closed
hooded eyes
fleshy folds under the eyes
pouchy, pouched, pouch-eyed, baggy, bagged
wearing eyeglasses
bespectacled
Eye color
blue, cornflower blue, steely blue, icy blue, china blue, sapphire blue, baby blue
brown, velvet brown
gray, gooseberry, slate gray, slaty
green, greenish, emerald
light or golden brown, hazel
violet
amber
Eyebrows
thick
bushy, shaggy
jutting out or projecting
beetle-browed, beetling
thinned to a line with tweezers
tweezed, plucked, threaded
accented cosmetically
penciled
pronounced downward bend from the bridge of the nose
hook-nosed, hawk-nosed, beak-nosed, parrot-nosed, having an arched nose
slight or fine downward bend from the bridge
Roman, aquiline, patrician
long nose
leptorrhine, blade-like
nose curving out or upward
ski-jump nose
having a wide nose
broad-nosed, flat-nosed
short nose with flattened nostrils
snub-nosed, simous, stubby
having a broad and sometimes turned-up nose
pug-nosed
having a large and bulbous nose
cob-nosed
having a somewhat flattened nose
button-nosed
having a protuberant or swollen-looking (and sometimes reddish) nose
bottle-nosed
having an inflamed nose (as from habitual drunkenness)
copper-nosed
nose turned up at the end
upturned, uptilted, retroussé
wrinkled
crinkled
having large and projecting ears
big-eared, jug-eared
having large and floppy ears
spaniel-eared
having an injury-deformed or battered ear
cauliflower-eared
small or delicately shapely ears
seashell ears
having ears upright and somewhat pointed
prick-eared, having satyr-like ears
MOUTH, LIPS, TEETH, JAW, AND NECK
having a loose or slightly open mouth
slack-mouthed
well-shaped lips
shapely, full, sensuous, sensual, ripe, generous
small but prominent or puffy
bee-stung, Botoxed
thick lips
blubber
having cracked or weathered lips from exposure to wind or cold
chapped
having a thin mouth or lips
thin-lipped, slash-mouthed
crooked or twisted mouth
screw mouth
mouth with a protruding upper lip
satchel mouth, shad mouth
classically shapely upper lip
Cupid’s bow
having grayish or reddish brown lips
liver-lipped
lips with much or bright lipstick
rouged
having protruding upper teeth
bucktoothed, having an overbite
having a space or spaces between teeth
gap-toothed, gat-toothed
having a jutting or broken tooth
snaggle-toothed
strong- or wide-jawed
square-jawed, lantern-jawed
straight-jawed
orthognathous
crooked-jawed
skew-jawed, agee-jawed
firm-jawed
with a set jaw
having a projecting lower jaw
wopple-jawed, jimber-jawed, prognathous, prognathic
having a projecting upper jaw
jutting, opisthognathous
having the lower jaw hanging down (often stupidly)
slack-jawed
having a double chin
double-chinned, dewlaps
having a thick neck
bull-necked
long and graceful neck
swanlike
having a short neck
no-neck
fleshy or flabby neck
baggy, wattled
having a scrawny neck
turkey-necked
bent and knobby or somewhat deformed
gnarled, horny, knotted, crooked
short fingers
stubby
fat and ugly fingers
sausage fingers
with knuckles, wrist, and other bones prominent
bony
long fingers
tapered
worn hands
coarse, rough, callused, chapped
having long legs
leggy, long-limbed, dolichocnemic
stick-legged
spindly, spindle-shanked
bowlegged
bandy-legged
having knees touching
knock-kneed
large knees
knobby
short and thick legs
stumpy, stubby, piano legs
crooked legs
gnarled, twisted
withered legs
atrophied
having turned-in feet
pigeon-toed
having turned-out feet
duck-footed, splayfooted
walking
stepping, pacing, treading, ambulating, perambulating
walking in an orderly way
marching, processing, filing
walking in a leisurely, easygoing way
sauntering
walking slowly or dragging the feet
shuffling, shambling
walking slowly or heavily
lumbering, loping, schlepping
walking swiftly
rolling, barreling, swooping
walking with quick and hurried steps
scuttling, darting, scurrying, scampering
walking in a jerky or uncertain way
reeling, lurching, staggering, tottering, toddling, wobbling, unsteady, faltering, stumbling
walking in a rigid, unfluid way
stiff-legged
walking quietly or with muffled sound
tiptoeing, padding
walking in a lively way
bouncy, sprightly, skipping, tripping
walking easily or confidently
light-footed, sure-footed, striding briskly, gliding, ambling, strolling
walking effeminately
mincing, flouncing, flitting
walking haltingly
limping, hobbling, claudicant
walking in search of or with effort
trekking, traipsing, tramping
walking or moving about in search of pleasure
gallivanting
walking awkwardly or loudly
clomping, stomping, galumphing
walking arrogantly
strutting, swaggering, promenading, parading, prancing
walking heavily or wearily
plodding, tramping, trudging, slogging, dragging, straggling
walking with purpose or without hesitation
striding, marching, bearing down
walking aimlessly
rambling, wandering, roving, traipsing, gadding
walking with duck-like short steps
waddling
walking furtively
prowling, skulking, slinking
walking warily or timidly
pussyfooting, creeping
walking or moving in a grand or stylish manner
sweeping
walking in a conspicuous or ostentatious way
sashaying
running or hastening
sprinting, dashing
clear
audible, firm, resolute, authoritative, carefully articulated, crisp, distinct
high
high-pitched, soprano, shrill, girlish, treble
squeaky
twittery
low
deep, dark, baritone, basso
cold
hard, steely, dry, chilling, dispassionate, insensible, unfeeling, affectless
warm
friendly, intimate
soft
muted, subdued, whispery, low, breathy, modulated
loud
strong, robust, ringing, stentorian, prodigious, booming, commanding, hearty
loud and irritating
sharp, grating, harsh, piercing, brassy, screechy, ear-splitting, shrieking, strident, caterwauling
pleasant or soothing
euphonious, melodious, sweet, dulcet, mellifluous, velvety, rich, lyrical, languid, sweet, silken, soft, honey-voiced, winsome, appealing
bright or buoyant
chirpy, chirrupy, bubbly
slow-speaking and somewhat mannered (or with prolonged vowels)
drawling
hesitant or without assuredness
halting
mournful
sepulchral, funereal, lugubrious, somber
artificial or pretentious
affected, orotund, stilted
alluring
seductive, spell-binding, hypnotic, entrancing, beguiling, bewitching, enchanting, enticing, cajoling, sirenic
falsely or overly sweet or smug
unctuous, cloying, saccharine, ingratiating, oily, oleaginous
having overly inflected or particularly noticeable S sounds
sibilant, hissing
affectedly elegant, lisping
mincing
stammering or overly excited
stuttering, sputtering, spluttering
unpleasantly loud
brassy
like a flute
fluted, fluty
shrill and piping
reedy
low and throaty
husky, gruff, scratchy, raspy, hoarse, gravel-voiced, wheezy, roupy, guttural, smoky
deep
full, resonant, sonorous
deeply mellow and refined
plummy
hollow
tinny
without intonation
monotonous, monotone, flat
nasal
catarrhal, asthmatic
whiny
whimpering, puling, mewling
rising and falling monotonously
singsong, jingly
nervous
uncertain, quavering, timorous, tremulous, quavery, edgy
with audibility deadened or blocked
muffled
with syllables indistinct or running together
slurred
healthy
hearty, hale, robust, vigorous, sound, red-blooded, vital, strong, glowing
unhealthy
sick, sickly, wan, unwell, ailing, not well, weak, run-down, indisposed, under the weather, out of sorts, lacking vigor, unsound
tired or tiring
weary, faint, fatigued, worn, worn out, enervated, drained, debilitated, exhausted, wilting, wilted, languishing, run-down, spent, enfeebled, sapped, raddled
lacking a sense of balance
unsteady, light-headed, dizzy, dazed, stunned, reeling, wobbly, wobbling, buckling, tottering, staggering, tipsy, unstable, losing one’s equilibrium
sleepy
somnolent, nodding, drowsy, slumberous, slumbrous, yawning, lethargic, comatose, half asleep, groggy, soporific, oscitant
having skin that is markedly pale
pallid, etiolated, wan, pasty, drained, whey-faced, chalky, cadaverous, ghostly
having sickly or yellowish skin
sallow, jaundiced, icteric
red-faced
blushing, flushed, reddened, rubescent, ruddy, raddled, florid
lacking feeling or sensation
insensible, insensate, anesthetized, deadened, desensitized, numb, impassible, impassive, insentient, unsusceptible, unresponsive, unexcitable
overly sensitive to touch
hypersensitive, raw, tender
disabled
crippled, incapacitated, out of action, hors de combat, handicapped, challenged, enfeebled
being severely cold or having chills
shivering, shaking, aguish, having shivers, having the shakes, having goose bumps, having gooseflesh
having a seizure or fit
convulsing, trembling, quavering, jerking, spasmodic, quivering, atremble, shuddering, tremulous, having tremors, having paroxysms, palsied
having difficulty breathing
short of breath, gasping, panting, wheezing, having labored breathing, stertorous, rhonchal, rhonchial
infected
impure, contaminated, corrupted, septic
sick to one’s stomach
dyspeptic, colicky, having indigestion, nauseated, nauseous, under the weather, green around the gills
stiffness
rigidity, rigor
broken bone
fracture
feeling pain or a type of pain
sore, painful, hurting, smarting, sharp, stinging, aching, throbbing, burning, searing, biting, gnawing, chafing, piercing, stabbing, in the throes, having pangs, shooting, angry, fiery, pounding, acute
feeling severe pain
tormenting, excruciating, agonizing, in agony, hellish, torturous, in anguish, atrocious
perspiring
sweating, having beads of sweat, moist, damp, wet
discolored (tissue)
black and blue, livid, bruised, blemished, contused, ecchymotic
inflamed (tissue)
swollen, tumescent
irritated, worn, or rubbed away by friction
abraded
burned
scorched, singed, scalded, blistered, sunburned, wind-burned
speaking unclearly or incoherently
rambling, babbling, raving, gibbering, gabbling, driveling, maundering
having saliva coming out of the mouth
slobbering, dribbling, drooling
unconscious
in a faint, fainted, blacked out, comatose, knocked out, out cold, out, dead to the world, in a swoon
cut (flesh)
lacerated, stabbed, pierced, punctured, pricked, incised, slit, slashed, gashed, sliced, hacked, axed, knifed
in shock
traumatized
in a drugged state
narcotized, strung out, spaced out, stoned, spacey, spacy, zonked, zonked out
vomiting
regurgitating, disgorgement, puking, retching
bleeding
bloody, sanguinary, hemorrhaging, hemorrhagic, exsanguinating, sanguineous
showing putrefaction
putrid, foul
discharging pus
suppurating, pussy, purulent
small crack in a bone
stress fracture
partial break or bend in a bone (esp. in children)
greenstick fracture, incomplete fracture
fracture with no open wound in the skin
simple fracture, closed fracture
fracture with an open wound in the skin
open fracture, compound fracture
fracture in which the bone is crushed or splintered
comminuted fracture
fracture in which the bone is pressed together on itself
compression fracture
fracture in which the bone has been twisted apart
spiral fracture, torsion fracture
difficulty breathing or shortness of breath
dyspnea
absence of spontaneous respiration
apnea
deep or rapid breathing
hyperpnea, tachypnea
shallow or slow breathing
hypopnea
high blood pressure
hypertension
low blood pressure
hypotension
high heart rate
tachycardia
low heart rate
bradycardia
cessation of the heartbeat
cardiac arrest
fainting or loss of consciousness
syncope, lipothymia
abnormal physical sensitivity
hyperesthesia
severe reaction to a foreign substance, such as insect toxin, a chemical, or a particular food
anaphylaxis
subnormal body temperature
hypothermia
high fever
hyperpyrexia
inflammation
edema
increased blood flow to a body part
hyperemia
vomiting
emesis
purplish discoloration from ruptured blood vessels
ecchymosis
vomiting blood
hematemesis
bluish skin discoloration due to inadequate oxygen reaching tissue
cyanosis
insufficient oxygen reaching body tissues
hypoxia
insufficient oxygen in blood
hypoxemia
excessive response to a stimulus
hyperirritability
increased CO2 level in blood
hypercapnia
perspiration
hidrosis
excessive perspiring
hyperhidrosis
lacking or showing no perspiration
anhidrosis
pathological changes caused by inadequate oxygen inhaled from air
asphyxia
interrupted breathing (suffocation) resulting in loss of consciousness or death
asphyxiation
rapid and random contractions of the heart
fibrillation
deficient blood supply due to constriction or obstruction of a blood vessel
ischemia
small bruises or pinpoint hemorrhages
petechiae
abnormal crackling or rattling sound heard while inhaling
rale
redness of skin
erythema
forcibly separated or detached
avulsed
chest pain due to deficient oxygenation of the heart muscles
angina pectoris, angina
appropriate
correct, proper, decent, suitable, apropos, seemly, decorous, felicitous, kempt
proper and wholesome
respectable, clean-cut, conservative, modest, discreet, fitting, comme il faut, conforming to standards, orthodox, tasteful
formal
dressed up, elegant, dressy, all decked out
inappropriately formal
overdressed
meticulous
exquisite, impeccable, fastidious
fashionable or smart
stylish, modish, chic, swell, a la mode, in vogue, voguish, snappy, toney, sophisticated, debonair, polished, cosmopolitan, dashing, spiffy, snazzy, natty, dressed to the nines, becoming, soigné or soignée, spruce, high-toned, aristocratic, with it, hip, cool
sporty
rakish, jaunty, dapper
inappropriate
in poor taste, tasteless, unsuitable, inapropos, unseemly, outlandish, common, vulgar, crude, raffish
not fashionable
old-fashioned, frumpy, frumpish, drab, dowdy, frowsy, frowzy, shabby
heterogeneous or of different colors
motley
informal
casual, come as you are, undressy, homey, off-handed, relaxed, dressed down
inappropriately informal
underdressed
not neat or tidy
unkempt, disheveled, rumpled, slovenly, shabby, grubby, sloppy, untidy, slobby, grungy
flashy
showy, flamboyant, garish, foppish, frilly, extravagant, obvious, out there
cheap
gaudy, vulgar, tacky, common, tawdry, meretricious, cheapjack
immodest
sexy, provocative, revealing, daring, lewd, salacious, lascivious, sluttish, slutty, scantily clad, shameless, scandalous
worn
ragged, frayed, shopworn, threadbare, shabby, tatterdemalion, seedy, ragtag, ratty, tattered
shabby but trying to appear dignified
shabby-genteel
attractive or beautiful
pretty, handsome, comely, prepossessing, becoming, lovely, appealing, beauteous, exquisite, adorable, gorgeous, cute, pulchritudinous, ravishing, stunning, good-looking, fair, well-favored, pleasing, breathtaking, bonny, fetching
ordinary
nondescript, forgettable, plain, undistinguished, unremarkable, commonplace, prosaic
unattractive
unbecoming, unappealing, ugly, homely, unprepossessing, unsightly, hideous, repugnant, repellent, repulsive, ghastly, unlovely, ill-favored, ill-featured, uncomely, not much to look at
Medical Terms for Bones and Other Anatomical Parts
skull
cranium
roof and upper sides of cranium
parietal bones
posterior floor and walls of cranium
occipital bones
sides and base of cranium
temporal bones
forehead
frontal bone
cheekbones
zygomatic bones
lower jawbone
mandible
upper jaw bones
maxillary bones, maxillae, maxillas
bones in the neck
cervical vertebrae
Adam’s apple
thyroid cartilage
shoulder blade
scapula
collarbone
clavicle
backbone
spinal column, vertebral column
upper arm bone
humerus
forearm bones
ulna and (smaller) radius
“funny bone”
olecranon process
wrist bones
carpals
finger bones
phalanges (singular: phalanx)
bony enclosing wall of the chest
rib cage
breastbone
sternum
shinbone
tibia
thigh bone
femur
kneecap
patella
behind the knee
popliteal muscles, vessels, and ligaments
lower leg
tibia or shinbone and (smaller) fibula
ankle (projections)
malleoli
heel bone
calcaneus
foot bones
metatarsals
toe bones
phalanges (singular: phalanx)
Perhaps inspired by the sun breaking through the tail end of a cumulus cloud riding a fair, southwesterly breeze, or maybe it comes out of the nicotine from his first cigarette in more than five minutes. Mako stretches for the sky. He’s a big man, six foot five, thick in all the right places, his shoulders barely squeezing through hatchways. An athlete in profile, he casts a shadow considered the largest anywhere on the waterfront. He has plenty of jet-black hair and a set of long legs attached to an unpadded thirty-six-inch waist. He elicits playful looks from divorcées years younger than he. They all love what they see: Liam Neeson goes to sea.
—RORY NUGENT, Down at the Docks
Murphy had often inspected Mr. Endon’s eyes, but never with such close and prolonged attention as now.
In shape they were remarkable, being both deep-set and protuberant, one of Nature’s jokes involving sockets so widely splayed that Mr. Endon’s brows and cheekbones seemed to have subsided. And in colour scarcely less so, having almost none. For the whites, of which a sliver appeared below the upper lid, were very large indeed and the pupils prodigiously dilated, as though by permanent excess of light. The iris was reduced to a thin glaucous rim of spawnlike consistency, so like a ballrace between the black and white that these could have started to rotate in opposite direction, without causing Murphy the least surprise.
—SAMUEL BECKETT, Murphy
He was a large heavy man. He was bearded. His hair was overgrown and unkempt. His eyes were blue and set in a field of pink that suggested a history of torments and conflicts past ordinary understanding. His weight and size seemed to amplify the act of breathing, which took place through his mouth. His nose looked swollen, a web of fine purple lines ran up his cheeks from the undergrowth, and all the ravage together told of the drinker.
—E. L. DOCTOROW, Loon Lake
“Let’s try something closer to your level. What is this?” she asked, raising her thumb.
“I believe that is a thumb.”
“No,” she said. “It is the first digit composed of the metacarpal, the proximal phalange, and the distal phalange.”
“That’s another way of saying it.”
—ANTHONY MARRA, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Webb is the oldest man of their regular foursome, fifty and then some—a lean thoughtful gentleman in roofing and siding contracting and supply with a calming gravel voice, his long face broken into longitudinal strips by creases and his hazel eyes almost lost under an amber tangle of eyebrows. He is the steadiest golfer, too. The one unsteady thing about him, he is on his third wife; this is Cindy, a plump brown-backed honey still smelling of high school, though they have two little ones, a boy and a girl, ages five and three. Her hair is cut short and lies wet in one direction, as if surfacing from a dive, and when she smiles her teeth look unnaturally even and white in her tan face, with pink spots of peeling on the roundest part of her cheeks; she has an exciting sexually neutral look, though her boobs slosh and shiver in the triangular little hammocks of her bra.
—JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit Is Rich
A couple ducked in late, slid into the pew next to her, and promptly closed their eyes in prayer, leaving Dellarobia free to scrutinize them. The man wore sporty sunglasses pushed on top of his head as if he’d just hopped out of a convertible. But if that was the wife with him, there was no convertible in the story. She’d probably spent two hours getting her hair organized and congealed, the bangs individually shellacked into little spears, all pointing eyeward, which made Dellarobia cringe. She had a thing about eyes. Preston had a habit that killed her, of poking himself along the hairline with his pencil while pondering what to write. Every pointed jab went into her own flesh, her own eyes wincing reflexively.
—BARBARA KINGSOLVER, Flight Behavior
And he saw her, with the dumb, pale, startled ghosts of joy and desire hovering in him yet, a thin, vivid, dark-eyed girl, with something Indian in her cheekbones and her carriage and her hair; looking at him with that look in which were blended mockery, affection, desire, impatience, and scorn; dressed in the flamelike colors that, in fact, she had seldom worn, but that he always thought of her as wearing.
—JAMES BALDWIN, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Joanie, Joanie, my friend with the webbed toes, why do I make Dr. Torbein so uncomfortable, don’t you think he’d be used to this by now, he must get it all the time, even if he doesn’t get it all all the time, you know what I mean? (Joanie smiles and looks at her feet a lot.) I mean, he’s got his glasses so far down here, see, that he has to tuck two of his chins back into the recesses of his throat in order to read The Clipboard, which seems to grow out of his gut like some visceral suburbia, and unless we are speaking of the ferrous content of blood, he is utterly ill at ease with irony and gets twitches, like this, see? (Horrid, feeble humor.)
—LORRIE MOORE, “Go Like This,” Self-Help
Students called Zolo “Rolo,” because, if only in stature and complexion, he happened to resemble that particularly chewable chocolate caramel candy. He was short, tan and round, wore bright plaid Christmas pants regardless of the time of year, and his thick, yellow-white hair encrusted his shiny freckled forehead as if, ages ago, Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing had been dribbled all over him.
—MARISHA PESSL, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Winnie was barely into her thirties but she had a sane and practiced eye for the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life. A narrow face partly hidden by wispy brown ringlets, eyes bright and excited. She had the beaky and hollow-boned look of a great wading creature. Small prim mouth. A smile that was permanently in conflict with some inner stricture against the seductiveness of humor.
—DON DELILLO, White Noise
“I have the address. I wrote it down. It was on her knapsack like mine is.” Louise said the name of the street, which was east, out St. Claude, almost to the parish line, in the part of town where many houses had been destroyed by the hurricane, two years ago. “They’re leaving today,” she said. Louise had long straight honey-brown hair and wore tortoiseshell glasses that made her look older than thirteen, made her look businesslike, which in a way she was. She was wearing her blue gingham Trinity skirt and her uniform white blouse and her white kneesocks. She looked perfect.
—RICHARD FORD, “Leaving for Kenosha,” The New Yorker, March 3, 2008
Otto has a face like a very ripe peach. His hair is fair and thick, growing low on his forehead. He has small sparkling eyes, full of naughtiness, and a wide, disarming grin, which is much too innocent to be true. When he grins, two large dimples appear in his peach-blossom cheeks.
—CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD, Goodbye to Berlin
After he had finished his long process of washing I went for a walk with my father, along the Embankment, past Cleopatra’s Needle and the Sphinxes, black beasts which the pigeons had decked with a white crust. He was a tall man, over six foot in height, with fair hair which left the top of his head but never went grey. His legs were long and very thin, his feet and hands small, his stomach grew in swelling isolation. He had a high forehead; but his nose was thick, his chin grew fat and his lower jaw protruded so that he couldn’t be called handsome. His eyes were a clear, light blue; and now that he could no longer see he had abandoned his spectacles.
—JOHN MORTIMER, Clinging to the Wreckage
His face was not as square as his son’s and, indeed, the chin, though firm enough in outline, retreated a little, and the lips, ambiguous, were curtained by a moustache. But there was no external hint of weakness. The eyes, if capable of kindness and good-fellowship, if ruddy for the moment with tears, were the eyes of one who could not be driven. The forehead, too, was like Charles’s. High and straight, brown and polished, merging abruptly into temples and skull, it had the effect of a bastion that protected his head from the world.
—E. M. FORSTER, Howards End
You’re probably imagining my dad as this maladjusted, socially inept FOB who didn’t know what he was saying to me. He was just the opposite. At home, he’d walk around in his underwear and house sandals, but if he had a meeting out came the Jheri curl, gator shoes, and Cartier sunglasses.
—EDDIE HUANG, Fresh Off the Boat
She was one of those women who are middle-aged too soon, her skin burned into the colors of false health. Thin, nervous, her face was screwed tight, and in those moments when she relaxed, the lines around her forehead and mouth were exaggerated, for the sun had not touched them. Pale haggard eyes looked out from sun-reddened lids. She was wearing an expensive dress but had only succeeded in making it look dowdy. The bones of her chest stood out, and a sort of ruffle fluttered on her freckled skin with a parched rustling movement like a spinster’s parlor curtain.
—NORMAN MAILER, The Deer Park
“Good evening, Nathaniel,” said MARBLE. Slight British accent from the assignment in London, leavened by his time in New York. A whim to use English, to be closer to his case officer, despite Nate’s nearly fluent Russian. MARBLE was short and stocky, with deep brown eyes separated by a fleshy nose. He had bushy white eyebrows, which matched his full head of wavy white hair, giving him the appearance of an elegant boulevardier.
—JASON MATTHEWS, Red Sparrow
It was the French Lieutenant’s Woman. Part of her hair had become loose and half covered her cheek. On the Cobb it had seemed to him a dark brown; now he saw that it had red tints, a rich warmth, and without the then indispensable gloss of feminine hair oil. The skin below seemed very brown, almost ruddy, in that light, as if the girl cared more for health than a fashionably pale and languid-cheeked complexion. A strong nose, heavy eyebrows . . . the mouth he could not see.
—JOHN FOWLES, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
She was much older than me, at least eleven. Her red-brown hair was worn relatively short, for a girl, and her nose was snub. She was freckled. She wore a red skirt—girls didn’t wear jeans much back then, not in those parts. She had a soft Sussex accent and sharp gray-blue eyes.
—NEIL GAIMAN, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The author of the paper, Albert O. Birdless, nineteen, from Marathon, Cascadia, was majoring in vocational education. His build reminded Levin of a young tugboat. He was stocky, with a short neck, heavy shoulders and legs, and stubby feet in square-toed shoes. His longish crewcut appeared to have gone to seed. On his head he usually wore a freshman beanie.
—BERNARD MALAMUD, A New Life
Clare is already seated in a booth and she looks relieved when she sees me. She waves at me like she’s in a parade.
“Hello,” I say. Clare is wearing a wine-colored velvet dress and pearls. She looks like a Botticelli by way of John Graham: huge gray eyes, long nose, tiny delicate mouth like a geisha. She has long red hair that covers her shoulders and falls to the middle of her back. Clare is so pale she looks like a waxwork in the candlelight. I thrust the roses at her. “For you.”
—AUDREY NIFFENEGGER, The Time Traveler’s Wife
At thirteen she went every day to the dancing school, and at thirteen Jenny had deliciously slim legs and a figure as lithe as a hazel wand. Her almond eyes were of some fantastic shade of sapphire-blue with deep grey twilights in them and sea-green laughters. They were extraordinary eyes whose underlids always closed first. Her curls never won back the silver they had lost in the country; but her complexion had the bloom and delicate texture of a La France rose, although in summer her straight little nose was freckled like a bird’s egg. Her hands were long and white, her lips very crimson and translucent; but the under-lip protruded slightly, and bad temper gave it a vicious look. Her teeth were small, white and glossy as a cat’s.
—COMPTON MACKENZIE, Carnival
Looking in the huge mirror, she considers her hair, a cloud of maddened bees. In lieu of an hour with hot irons and pins, she catches one honey-brown curl and thrusts it back into the hive.
—EMMA DONOGHUE, Frog Music
For one thing, it provides the extra dash of suspense that comes with every Harrison Ford picture: What will he do with his hair? Throughout Star Wars, you stared at Han Solo and wondered how a civilization advanced enough to wage war in space could still allow its heroes to wear their hair over their ears, like midcareer Beatles. Ford turned up in Presumed Innocent with an unexpected razor cut, and now, in The Fugitive, he has shaggy locks and a beard. They give him an ecclesiastical air; if he slipped on a robe and held up two fingers, he could pose for a Greek icon.
—ANTHONY LANE, Nobody’s Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker
“Don’t be nervous. Remember, she wants you here,” Obinze whispered, just before his mother appeared. She looked like Onyeka Onwenu, the resemblance was astounding: a full-nosed, full-lipped beauty, her round face framed by a low Afro, her faultless complexion the deep brown of cocoa. Onyeka Onwenu’s music had been one of the luminous joys of Ifemel’s childhood, and had remained undimmed in the aftermath of childhood.
—CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, Americanah
Phineas had soaked and brushed his hair for the occasion. This gave his head a sleek look, which was contradicted by the surprised, honest expression which he wore on his face. His ears, I had never noticed before, were fairly small and set close to his head, and combined with his plastered hair they now gave his bold nose and cheekbones the sharp look of a prow.
—JOHN KNOWLES, A Separate Peace
“Her axillary temp was fifty degrees,” Scarpetta continued. “The low last night was thirty-four; the high during the day was forty-seven. The mark left by the scarf is a superficial circumferential dry brown abrasion. There’s no suffusion, no petechia of the face or conjunctiva. The tongue wasn’t protruding.”
—PATRICIA CORNWELL, The Scarpetta Factor
Journalist First Class Mac Lean was a small round-bellied man wearing parts of a Seabee uniform with a forty-five holstered on his guard belt. His arms were freckled and thickly tattooed; he had a pink boozer’s face adorned with a sinister goatee and wraparound sunglasses.
—ROBERT STONE, Dog Soldiers
Mom’s gestures were all familiar—the way she tilted her head and thrust out her lower lip when studying items of potential value that she’d hoisted out of the Dumpster, the way her eyes widened with childish glee when she found something she liked. Her long hair was streaked with gray, tangled and matted, and her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets, but still she reminded me of the mom she’d been when I was a kid, swan-diving off cliffs and painting in the desert and reading Shakespeare aloud. Her cheekbones were still high and strong, but the skin was parched and ruddy from all those winters and summers exposed to the elements. To the people walking by, she probably looked like any of the homeless people in New York City.
—JEANNETTE WALLS, The Glass Castle
The charm of Edna Pontellier’s physique stole insensibly upon you. The lines of her body were long, clean and symmetrical; it was a body which occasionally fell into splendid poses; there was no suggestion of the trim, stereotyped fashion-plate about it.
—KATE CHOPIN, The Awakening
Dio, but she was a beauty. Perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old, laced into a rosy silk gown draped over her mare’s white flanks in such abundant pleats that I could list at least three broken sumptuary laws. Breasts like white peaches, a pale column of a neck, a little face all rosy with happiness—and hair. Such hair, glinting gold in the sunlight, twined with pearls and tucked with cream-colored roses.
—KATE QUINN, The Serpent and the Pearl: A Novel of the Borgias
Directly next to me, on the first cross seat, is a very fine-looking girl. She is a strapping girl but by no means too big, done up head to toe in cellophane, the hood pushed back to show a helmet of glossy black hair. She is magnificent with her split tooth and her Prince Val bangs split on her forehead. Gray eyes and wide black brows, a good arm and a fine swell of calf above her cellophane boot. One of those solitary Amazons one sees on Fifty-seventh Street in New York or in Neiman Marcus in Dallas.
—WALKER PERCY, The Moviegoer
She was beautiful. Fin liked her hair, which was long. He liked her teeth. She thought they were too big, but she was wrong. She was like a horse. Not one of the Pounds’ heavy Morgan horses with short sturdy necks and thick clomping legs. She was like a racehorse. Jittery. Majestic. Her long neck and long legs—and her face, too. She had a horsey face, in a beautiful way. And bangs, like a forelock.
—CATHLEEN SCHINE, Fin & Lady
He just look her up and down. She bout seven or eight months pregnant, bout to bust out her dress. Harpo so black he think she bright, but she ain’t that bright. Clear medium brown skin, gleam on it like on good furniture. Hair notty but a lot of it, tied up on her head in a mass of plaits. She not quite as tall as Harpo but much bigger, and strong and ruddy looking, like her mama brought her up on pork.
—ALICE WALKER, The Color Purple
Henry watched his mother’s eyes meet Dr. Luke’s: the doctor paused, then nodded. At the door of his parents’ room, Henry could smell Buddhist incense burning, along with some kind of cleaning solution. His mother turned on a small lamp in the corner. As Henry’s eyes adjusted, he beheld his father, looking small and frail. He lay like a prisoner of his bed—the covers pulled up tight around his chest, which seemed to move in a jerky, uneven rhythm. His skin was pale, and one side of his face looked bloated, like it had been in a fight while the other side watched and did nothing. His arm lay at his side, palm up; a long tube connected at his wrist led to a bottle of clear fluid that hung from the bedpost.
—JAMIE FORD, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
He walked over to her as quietly as if she were asleep, feeling strange to be by himself, and stood on tiptoe beside her and looked down into her sunbonnet towards her ear. Her temple was deeply sunken as if a hammer had struck it and frail as a fledgling’s belly. Her skin was crosshatched with the razor-fine slashes of innumerable square wrinkles and yet every slash was like smooth stone; her ear was just a fallen intricate flap with a small gold ring in it; her smell was faint yet very powerful, and she smelled like new mushrooms and old spices and sweat, like his fingernail when it was coming off.
—JAMES AGEE, A Death in the Family
Most of the time the swelling eventually went down and I could get the leg straight enough to put weight on it. And then I would forget about the incident and try to return as swiftly as possible to the pressing duties of being an energetic boy. Finally, on one occasion that I have blocked from my memory, I had such a massive bleeding that the knee slowly jackknifed. I would not be able to put weight on it again for more than seven years.
With a marvelous combination of sympathy and challenge, my parents helped me fight off the occasional bouts of depression that would seize me when I was confined to my bed.
—BOB MASSIE, A Song in the Night: A Memoir of Resilience
Andrew is just as thin as I am fat, and his clothes hang on him in the most comical way. He is very tall and shambling, wears a ragged beard and a broad Stetson hat, and suffers amazingly from hay fever in the autumn.
—CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, Parnassus on Wheels
If Miss Baeza could get a man, anyone could. Rogelia Baeza ruled the typing roost at Cabritoville High. She was short, broad-faced, with a good, solid D-cup on her. Her wide hips anchored her spindly bowlegged goat’s legs on the ground. Her small, hooflike feet were unbelievably nimble. She moved without sound and would sneak up on you as you were quietly fff fvf vvv fff fvf vvv fff fvf vvv fvfing.
—DENISE CHÁVEZ, Loving Pedro Infante
The other was a remarkable fellow. He was in his middle forties, slim, a bit stoop-shouldered. His eyes were black and deep-set. His eyebrows were bushy. He had long arms and wrists, and although he used his hands constantly in making conversation, they were relaxed and delicate in their movements.
—JAMES A. MICHENER, Tales of the South Pacific
When Claude walked into my apartment for the first time he looked like he had never had a good day in his life. He wore a jacket and shirt and clean blue jeans and real shoes, not sneakers. That told you something positive right there. He was thin and handsome—my guess was one parent with ancestors in Japan and another with history in Africa, with a few different coasts of Europe thrown in, and later I found out I was right.
—SARA GRAN, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway
Their commander was a middle-aged corporal—red-eyed, scrawny, tough as dried beef, sick of war.
—KURT VONNEGUT, Slaughterhouse Five
But the sweet young girl was the daintiest thing these premises, within or without, could offer for contemplation: delicately chiseled features, of Grecian cast; her complexion the pure snow of a japonica that is receiving a faint reflected enrichment from some scarlet neighbor of the garden; great, soft blue eyes fringed with long curving lashes; an expression made up of the trustfulness of a child and the gentleness of a fawn; a beautiful head crowned with its own prodigal gold; a lithe and rounded figure, whose every attitude and movement was instinct with native grace.
—MARK TWAIN, “The Loves of Alonzo Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton,” Best Short Stories by Mark Twain
Mama uncoiled her braids and let them down and waited for me to unwind them. In truth, she had only to shake her head and the braids unfurled, but she knew I loved to feel the tight plaits go soft and free in my hands. When she wasn’t too tired, she let me sit next to her on her bed and practice my seaman’s knots on her hair: sheet bend and monkey fist, timber hitch and lineman’s loop. Her hair hung in a long pale wave that she sometimes allowed me to brush. I counted the strokes slowly to make them last, her hair popping and crackling as the dark bristles moved through it.
—JANICE CLARK, The Rathbones
Hurree Babu came out from behind the dovecot, washing his teeth with ostentatious ritual. Full-fleshed, heavy-haunched, bull-necked, and deep-voiced, he did not look like “a fearful man”.
—RUDYARD KIPLING, Kim
Tall, powerful, barefoot, graceful, soundless, Missouri Fever was like a supple black cat as she paraded serenely about the kitchen, the casual flow of her walk beautifully sensuous and haughty. She was slant-eyed, and darker than the charred stove; her crooked hair stood straight on end, as if she’d seen a ghost, and her lips were thick and purple. The length of her neck was something to ponder upon, for she was almost a freak, a human giraffe, and Joel recalled photos, which he’d scissored once from the pages of a National Geographic, of curious African ladies with countless silver chokers stretching their necks to improbable heights.
—TRUMAN CAPOTE, Other Voices, Other Rooms
Scurvy was common. Foodborne parasites and pathogens made diarrhea almost ubiquitous. Most feared was beriberi, a potentially deadly disease caused by a lack of thiamine. There were two forms of beriberi, and they could occur concurrently. “Wet” beriberi affected the heart and the circulatory system, causing marked edema—swelling—of the extremities; if not treated, it was often fatal. “Dry” beriberi affected the nervous system, causing numbness, confusion, unsteady gait, and paralysis.
—LAURA HILLENBRAND, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Mrs. Haydon was a short, stout, hard built, German woman. She always hit the ground very firmly and compactly as she walked. Mrs. Haydon was all a compact and well hardened mass, even to her face, reddish and darkened from its early blonde, with its hearty, shiny cheeks, and double chin well covered over with the up roll from her short, square neck.
—GERTRUDE STEIN, Three Lives
In the midst of this brown gloom Mr. Bodiham sat at his desk. He was the man in the Iron Mask. A grey metallic face with iron cheek-bones and a narrow iron brow; iron folds, hard and unchanging, ran perpendicularly down his cheeks; his nose was the iron beak of some thin, delicate bird of rapine. He had brown eyes, set in sockets rimmed with iron; round them the skin was dark, as though it had been charred. Dense wiry hair covered his skull; it had been black, it was turning grey. His ears were very small and fine. His jaws, his chin, his upper lip were dark, iron-dark, where he had shaved. His voice, when he spoke and especially when he raised it in preaching, was harsh, like the grating of iron hinges when a seldom-used door is opened.
—ALDOUS HUXLEY, Crome Yellow
Miserable food, ill-timed and greedily eaten, had played havoc with bone and muscle. They were all pale, flabby, sunken-eyed, hollow-chested, with eyes that glinted and shone and lips that were a sickly red by contrast. Their hair was but half attended to, their ears anemic in hue, and their shoes broken in leather and run down at heel and toe.
—THEODORE DREISER, Sister Carrie
For most people, this restriction is a nuisance. But a few dozen people have moved to Green Bank (population: 147) specifically because of it. They say they suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS—a disease not recognized by the scientific community in which these frequencies can trigger acute symptoms like dizziness, nausea, rashes, irregular heartbeat, weakness, and chest pains. Diane Schou came here with her husband in 2007 because radio-frequency exposure anywhere else she went gave her constant headaches. “Life isn’t perfect here. There’s no grocery store, no restaurants, no hospital nearby,” she told me when I visited her house last month. “But here, at least, I’m healthy. I can do things. I’m not in bed with a headache all the time.”
—JOSEPH STROMBERG, “Refugees of the Modern World,” Future Tense, Slate, April 12, 2013
Captain Marpole’s grizzled head emerged from the scuttle. A sea-dog: clear blue eyes of a translucent truth-worthiness: a merry, wrinkled, morocco-coloured face: a rumbling voice.
—RICHARD HUGHES, A High Wind in Jamaica
This was the first time I had seen Fletcher for nearly a year. He was a tall man who must once have been a handsome figure in the fine clothes he always wore and with his arrogant air and his finely chiseled face set off by his short-cropped black beard and brilliant eyes. Now a heaviness was setting in about his features and a fatty softness was beginning to show in his body.
—JACK SCHAEFER, Shane
They’d danced each dance together. The band had skiffled faster, her hair had loosened from the French roll she’d copied carefully from the cover of Bunty, her feet had ached, but still she’d kept on dancing. Not until Shirley, miffed at having been ignored, arrived aunt-like by her side and said the last bus home was leaving if Laurel cared to make her curfew (she, Shirley, was sure she didn’t mind either way) had she finally stopped.
—KATE MORTON, The Secret Keeper
She heard the feet cross the diningroom, then the swing door opened and Luster entered, followed by a big man who appeared to have been shaped of some substance whose particles would not or did not cohere to one another or to the frame which supported it. His skin was dead looking and hairless; dropsical too, he moved with a shambling gait like a trained bear. His hair was pale and fine. It had been brushed smoothly down upon his brow like that of children in daguerreotypes. His eyes were clear, of the pale sweet blue of cornflowers, his thick mouth hung open, drooling a little.
—WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
Seated right next to me, just my luck, was a painfully odd-looking woman with baby bangs and white cat-eye eyeglasses who might well have been there to cure Nosy Nellie disease. She kept leaning over, looking at my handbag, my shoes, sniffing so loudly that I wondered if I should offer her a recommendation for a good ENT doctor.
—DOROTHEA BENTON FRANK, The Last Original Wife
Not much taller than the Bishop in reality, he gave the impression of being an enormous man. His broad high shoulders were like a bull buffalo’s, his big head was set defiantly on a thick neck, and the full-cheeked, richly coloured, egg-shaped Spanish face—how vividly the Bishop remembered that face! It was so unusual that he would be glad to see it again; a high, narrow forehead, brilliant yellow eyes set deep in strong arches, and full, florid cheeks,—not blank areas of smooth flesh, as in Anglo-Saxon faces, but full of muscular activity, as quick to change with feeling as any of his features. His mouth was the very assertion of violent, uncurbed passions and tyrannical self-will; the full lips thrust out and taut, like the flesh of animals distended by fear or desire.
—WILLA CATHER, Death Comes for the Archbishop
Their smocks drenched in blood, with the nauseating scent of sepsis and cordite and human excrement fouling the operating theater, they cut and sliced and sawed and cauterized wounds of a sort they never would have known in ordinary practice.
—WADE DAVIS, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
He was a big, hefty fellow, good-looking in a rather flashy, sunburnt way. He had the hot, blue eyes usually associated with heavy drinking and loose living. His hair was reddish like his skin. In a few years he would run to fat, his neck bulging over the back of his collar. His mouth gave him away, it was too soft, too pink. I could smell the whisky in his breath from where I stood.
—DAPHNE DU MAURIER, Rebecca
The eyes—and it was my destiny to know them well—were large and handsome, wide apart as the true artist’s are wide, sheltering under a heavy brow and arched over by thick black eyebrows. The eyes themselves were of that baffling protean gray which is never twice the same; which runs through many shades and colorings like intershot silk in sunshine; which is gray, dark and light, and greenish gray, and sometimes of the clear azure of the deep sea. They were eyes that masked the soul with a thousand guises, and that sometimes opened, at rare moments, and allowed it to rush up as though it were about to fare forth nakedly into the world on some wonderful adventure,—eyes that could brood with the hopeless somberness of leaden skies; that could snap and crackle points of fire like those which sparkle from a whirling sword; that could grow chill as an arctic landscape, and yet again, that could warm and soften and be all a-dance with love-lights, intense and masculine, luring and compelling, which at the same time fascinate and dominate women till they surrender in a gladness of joy and of relief and sacrifice.
—JACK LONDON, The Sea Wolf
My teeth are only slightly crooked, and most of them are white. I have almost all my hair, which is curly and brown. My chest was concave when I was a child, but if you look closely, this is true of most children, and the weight lifting I did in prison helped with that, and while I don’t actually have a barrel chest, I might have half a barrel. My legs aren’t nearly as scrawny as they used to be, and have muscles and definition now. My nose would be Roman if my head were smaller. Even though I’m close to legally blind, I don’t have to obscure my piercing blue eyes with glasses, because I wear contact lenses.
—BROCK CLARKE, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England
Mrs. Reed might be at that time some six or seven-and-thirty; she was a woman of robust frame, square-shouldered and strong limbed, not tall, and, though stout, not obese; she had a somewhat large face, the under-jaw being much developed and very solid; her brow was low, her chin large and prominent, mouth and nose sufficiently regular; under her light eyebrows glimmered an eye devoid of ruth; her skin was dark and opaque, her hair nearly flaxen. . . .
—CHARLOTTE BRONTË, Jane Eyre
He was a muscular, short man with eyes that gleamed and blinked, a harsh voice, and a round, toneless, pock-marked face ornamented by a thin, dishevelled moustache sticking out quaintly under the tip of a rigid nose.
—JOSEPH CONRAD, Victory
But shock is not a one-time event. That system-junking you experience at the start goes away, of course. But then a lesser shock keeps showing up, to hurl a big muffling blanket over you. And when you push out of that, you feel it almost as a sudden blinking exposure to light. I’m talking about how your mind behaves after the broken circuit appears to be back up and running.
—DARIN STRAUSS, Half a Life: A Memoir
It was as if I was trying to catch some telltale expression in her eyes. But it wasn’t there; she had the same warm, intelligent, confident look. I just looked at her and didn’t think about her at all—I just laid there and enjoyed looking at a really fine chick. She had one of those heart-shaped faces with a cupid’s-bow mouth, and coal-black hair parted in the middle and pulled tight down over her ears.
—CHESTER HIMES, If He Hollers Let Him Go
Her shape was not only exact but extremely delicate, and the nice proportion of her arms promised the truest symmetry in her limbs. Her hair, which was black, was so luxuriant that it reached her middle before she cut it to comply with the modern fashion, and it was now curled so gracefully in her neck that few would believe it to be her own.
—HENRY FIELDING, Tom Jones
The cousin was so close now, that, when he lifted his hat, Dorothea could see a pair of grey eyes rather near together, a delicate irregular nose with a little ripple in it, and hair falling backward; and there was a mouth and chin of a more prominent, threatening aspect than belonged to the type of the grandmother’s miniature.
—GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
That November, Mr. Falvo, who taught American history, stopped me on my way out of class. It was my sophomore year. Falvo was a quick-moving, sharp-featured man with flat, razor-scraped cheeks, an Alfalfa cowlick and a shriveled right arm that looked like it belonged on an eight-year-old and felt—I knew because he insisted on shaking hands with it, hunching forward to make up the distance—exactly like a warm, dead fish. He’d gotten it in the war—Okinawa, they said.
—MARK SLOUKA, Brewster
The girls were sisters. One wore a green frock, the other a tunic of mauve jersey with an orange sash around her bottom. Their cheeks were rouged, their hair shingled, and their nostrils were cavernous.
—BRUCE CHATWIN, On the Black Hill
Chile was still in the chair when the new-wave barbers came back and began to comment, telling him they could perm what was left or give him a moderate spike, shave the sides, laser stripes were popular.
—ELMORE LEONARD, Get Shorty
There was a deep humility in Hale; his pride was only in his profession: he disliked himself before the glass, the bony legs and the pigeon breast, and he dressed shabbily and carelessly as a sign—a sign that he didn’t expect any woman to be interested.
—GRAHAM GREENE, Brighton Rock
I had only ever seen her briefly—on the few occasions she’d come by to pick Mina up for outings to Red Lobster, their favorite—and there was no other way to put it than to say: She was gargantuan. The loose-falling kurta and the neck scarf may have made her seem not quite so outsized as her more tightly fitting Western clothes did, but if so, the effect was minimal. As for the most distinctive aspect of her heft (at least to me)—her layered neck, its bulbous folds of flesh stacked successively, like scoops of a sundae, and topped with a round, reddish head so much smaller than the rest of her—the Pakistani clothes didn’t change that one bit.
—AYAD AKHTAR, American Dervish
And Loerke was not a serious figure. In his brown velvet cap that made his head as round as a chestnut, with the brown velvet flaps loose and wild over his ears, and a wisp of elf-like, thin black hair blowing above his full, elf-like dark eyes, the shiny, transparent brown skin crinkling up into odd grimaces on his small-featured face, he looked an odd little boy-man, a bat.
—D. H. LAWRENCE, Women in Love
Tashtego’s long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding eyes—for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression—all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
I did not so much look like a woman who had spent the past three weeks backpacking in the wilderness as I did like a woman who had been the victim of a violent and bizarre crime. Bruises that ranged in color from yellow to black lined my arms and legs, my back and rump, as if I’d been beaten with sticks. My hips and shoulders were covered with blisters and rashes, inflamed welts and dark scabs where my skin had broken open from being chafed by my pack.
—CHERYL STRAYED, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
His face was pale as death, and far more ghastly; the broad forehead was contracted in his agony, so that his eyebrows formed one grizzled line; his eyes were red and wild, and the foam hung white upon his quivering lip.
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales
He was a snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy enough, and as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see, but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man. He was short of his age, with rather bow-legs, and little, sharp, ugly eyes.
—CHARLES DICKENS, Oliver Twist
He was tall, slim, rather swarthy, with large saucy eyes. The rest of us wore rough tweed and brogues. He had on a smooth chocolate-brown suit with loud white stripes, suede shoes, a large bow-tie and he drew off yellow, wash-leather gloves as he came into the room; part Gallic, part Yankee, part, perhaps, Jew; wholly exotic.
—EVELYN WAUGH, Brideshead Revisited
Poor Maxwell. Ever since his return last month, from a pharmacological botanical specimen-gathering expedition, he’s been noticeably agitated, clumsy and distracted in the manner of one plagued by either fever or crisis. Apparently, something strange had happened in Costa Rica, and now Max was walking into things and breaking them, at a rate of about one electrical fixture, decorative serving dish, potted plant, or item of statuary every three days.
“What’s wrong with him, do you think?” Vergil whispered barely audibly in my ear.
Together we watched Max kneel unsteadily down among the lamp shards.
—DONALD ANTRIM, The Hundred Brothers
He placed himself at a corner of the doorway for her to pass him into the house, and doated on her cheek, her ear, and the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot—curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgeling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps—waved or fell, waxed over or up or involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger than long round locks of gold to trick the heart.
—GEORGE MEREDITH, The Egoist
She stands like this often, with her hands on her hips, pointy elbows pushed back like a fledging set of wings. She is pretty to you, Ruby, though her appearance is jarring, the eyes of a griot in the face of a girl. It’s an odd mixture of features: pointy chin, jutting cheekbones, tiny nose, initiation scars, village emblems.
—TAIYE SELASI, “The Sex Lives of African Girls,” Granta 115: The F Word
To the eye, the men were less similar: Littlefield, a hedge-scholar, tall and horse-faced; Chum Frink, a trifle of a man with soft and mouse-like hair, advertising his profession as poet by a silk cord on his eyeglasses; Vergil Gunch, broad, with coarse black hair en brosse; Eddie Swanson, a bald and bouncing young man who showed his taste for elegance by an evening waistcoat of figured black silk with glass buttons; Orville Jones, a steady-looking, stubby, not very memorable person, with a hemp-colored toothbrush mustache.
—SINCLAIR LEWIS, Babbitt
While he was using the lavatory, he began making his Evelyn Waugh face, then abandoned it in favour of one more savage than any he normally used. Gripping his tongue between his teeth, he made his cheeks expand into little hemispherical balloons; he forced his upper lip downwards into an idiotic pout; he protruded his chin like the blade of a shovel.
—KINGSLEY AMIS, Lucky Jim
Up close the woman looked maybe a year or two younger than the men. Early forties, possibly, rather than mid. She had jet black hair piled up high on her head and tied in a bun. Or a chignon. Or something. Reacher didn’t know the correct hairdressing term. She looked to be medium height and lean. Her shirt was clearly a smaller size than the men’s, but it was still loose on her. She was pretty, in a rather severe and no-nonsense kind of a way. Pale face, large eyes, plenty of makeup. She looked tired and a little ill at ease.
—LEE CHILD, A Wanted Man
Dr. Messinger, though quite young, was bearded, and Tony knew few young men with beards. He was also very small, very sunburned and prematurely bald; the ruddy brown of his face ended abruptly along the line of his forehead, which rose in a pale dome; he wore steel-rimmed spectacles and there was something about his blue serge suit which suggested that the wearer found it uncomfortable.
—EVELYN WAUGH, A Handful of Dust
Col. Grangerford was very tall and very slim, and had a darkish-paly complexion, not a sign of red in it anywhere; he was clean-shaved every morning, all over his thin face, and he had the thinnest kind of lips, and the thinnest kind of nostrils, and a high nose, and heavy eyebrows, and the blackest kind of eyes, sunk so deep back that they seemed like they was looking out of caverns at you, as you may say. His forehead was high, and his hair was gray and straight, and hung to his shoulders. His hands was long and thin. . . .
—MARK TWAIN, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. . . Alfred came leaping from the chair fantastically galvanized, horribly smiling, a travesty of enthusiasm, dancing around with rigid jerking limbs and circling the room at double-speed and then falling hard, face down, wham, like a ladder with its legs together, and lying prone there on the execution-room floor with every muscle in his body galvanically twitching and boiling.
—JONATHAN FRANZEN, The Corrections
Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray’s own face that he was looking at! The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that marvelous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth. The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet completely passed away from chiseled nostrils and from plastic throat.
—OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Believing that their chances will be slightly less negligible in a group, Spillane slowly makes his way toward the lights. He is buoyed up by his life vest and wetsuit and swimming with his broken arm stretched out in front of him, gripping the blanket bag. It takes a long time and the effort exhausts him, but he can see the lights slowly getting closer. They disappear in the wave troughs, appear on the crests, and then disappear again. Finally, after a couple of hours of swimming, he gets close enough to shout and then to make out their faces. It is Dave Ruvola and Jim Mioli, roped together with parachute cord. Ruvola seems fine, but Mioli is nearly incoherent with hypothermia.
—SEBASTIAN JUNGER, The Perfect Storm
Had orange blossoms been invented then (those touching emblems of female purity imported by us from France, where people’s daughters are universally sold in marriage), Miss Maria, I say, would have assumed the spotless wreath, and stepped into the travelling carriage by the side of gouty, old, bald-headed, bottle-nosed Bullock Senior. . . .
—WILLIAM THACKERAY, Vanity Fair
A withered face, with the shiny skin all drawn into wrinkles! The stretched skin under the jaw was like the skin of a plucked fowl. The cheek-bones stood up, and below them were deep hollows, almost like egg-cups. A short, scraggy white beard covered the lower part of the face. The hair was scanty, irregular, and quite white; a little white hair grew in the ears.
—ARNOLD BENNETT, The Old Wives’ Tale
And the men of the regiment, with their starting eyes and sweating faces, running madly, or falling, as if thrown headlong, to queer, heaped-up corpses—all were comprehended.
—STEPHEN CRANE, The Red Badge of Courage
His pallid bloated face expressed benevolent malice and, as he had advanced through his tidings of success, his small fat encircled eyes vanished out of sight and his weak wheezing voice out of hearing.
In reply to a question of Stephen’s his eyes and his voice came forth again from their lurking places.
—JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
His sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby
She padded to the bathroom and washed very carefully, brushed her teeth very meticulously. She felt like in school when you’ve done all your homework. She looked at herself in the mirror and then thought, Oh, Jesus, and turned out the bathroom light.
—MARCELLE CLEMENTS, Midsummer
In softness of features, body bulk, leanness of legs, apish shape of ear and upper lip, Dr. Pavil Pnin looked very like Timofey, as the latter was to look three or four decades later. In the father, however, a fringe of straw-colored hair relieved a waxlike calvity; he wore a black-rimmed pince-nez on a black ribbon like the late Dr. Chekhov; he spoke in a gentle stutter, very unlike his son’s later voice.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Pnin
She held the light at the same level, and it drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist no bigger than a child’s. Then, striking upward, it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edged her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows.
—EDITH WHARTON, Ethan Frome
. . . while the Haiti-born daughter of the French sugar planter and the woman whom Sutpen’s first father-in-law had told him was a Spaniard (the slight dowdy woman with untidy gray-streaked raven hair coarse as a horse’s tail, with parchment-colored skin and implacable pouched black eyes which alone showed no age because they showed no forgetting, whom Shreve and Quentin had likewise invented and which was likewise probably true enough). . . .
—WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom, Absalom!
Parsons, Winston’s fellow tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room—a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so much so that although he was wearing the regulation overalls, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the blue shorts, gray shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies.
—GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-Four
His body, which was nearly naked, presented a terrific emblem of death, drawn in intermingled colors of white and black. His closely shaved head, on which no other hair than the well known and chivalrous scalping tuft was preserved, was without ornament of any kind, with the exception of a solitary eagle’s plume, that crossed his crown and depended over the left shoulder.
—JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, The Last of the Mohicans
Edward Page turned slowly upon the bed, seeming to do so by a great effort. He was a big, bony man of perhaps sixty with harshly lined features and tired, luminous eyes. His whole expression was stamped with suffering and a kind of weary patience. And there was something more. The light of the oil lamp, falling across the pillow, revealed one half of his face expressionless and waxen. The left side of his body was equally paralyzed and his left hand, which lay upon the patchwork counterpane, was contracted to a shiny cone.
—A. J. CRONIN, The Citadel
She was a lawyer and lived in my building. I had been noticing her for months in the elevator. Her light blue eyes were heavily made up and looked almost yellow. Her dark eyebrows, however, preserved for them an intensity that would otherwise have been lost. She had high cheekbones and short auburn hair swept straight back. Her skin—at least when I saw her in the elevator—seemed to glow. But it was her eyes, on these occasions, that offered, with stunning insistence, the promise of sexual fulfillment.
—MARK STRAND, “More Life,” Mr. and Mrs. Baby and Other Stories
He was dressed all in decent black, with a white cravat round his neck. His face was as sharp as a hatchet, and the skin of it was as yellow and dry and withered as an autumn leaf. His eyes, of a steely light grey, had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself. His walk was soft; his voice was melancholy; his long lanky fingers were hooked like claws.
—WILKIE COLLINS, The Moonstone
A girl was standing there looking in. She had full, rouged lips and wide-spaced eyes, heavily made up. Her fingernails were red. Her hair hung in little rolled clusters, like sausages. She wore a cotton house dress and red mules, on the insteps of which were little bouquets of red ostrich feathers.
—JOHN STEINBECK, Of Mice and Men
His voice was generally too loud for its setting, for the porch on this homely, leaf-drowned block of wood-frame houses on this somnolent, hot afternoon, for example, but the oversize voice was well matched with his face, long and lean and not the least softened up at its edges by his five-dollar barbershop buzz cut, its narrow span busily occupied by a large, slightly hooked Roman nose and large, hooded green eyes and a wide, mobile mouth and large out-sticking ears, all of which he tirelessly manipulated as a clown would, launching his eyebrows or stretching his grin from one lobe to the other.
—SUSAN CHOI, My Education
Elmer Cowley was extraordinarily tall and his arms were long and powerful. His hair, his eyebrows, and the downy beard that had begun to grow upon his chin were pale almost to whiteness. His teeth protruded from between his lips and his eyes were blue with the colorless blueness of the marbles called “aggies” that the boys of Winesburg carried in their pockets.
—SHERWOOD ANDERSON, “Queer,” Winesburg, Ohio
We were, superficially at any rate, a very unlikely pair to become friendly. She was fair-haired and pretty, gaily dressed in corduroy trousers and a bright jersey, while I, mousy and rather plain anyway, drew attention to these qualities with my shapeless overall and old fawn skirt. Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person, nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her.
—BARBARA PYM, Excellent Women
Those fiery letters, meanwhile, had disappeared; there were ten seconds of complete darkness; then suddenly, dazzling and incomparably more solid-looking than they would have seemed in actual flesh and blood, far more real than reality, there stood the stereoscopic images, locked in one another’s arms, of a gigantic negro and a golden-haired young brachycephalic Beta-Plus female.
—ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Outside of Goethe and Byron, my sister was the object of most of my brother’s thoughts. She was a beautiful girl who played the piano nearly as well as my brother read and wrote, and it was widely considered a shame that they were related. For my part, I had a bit of a hatchet face. The Germans thought I looked French.
As for my brother and sister, if there was anything improper I never knew it, though when she spoke to him her words were made of cotton, or a sweet that dissolves on your tongue, whereas I was addressed as a cur dog.
—PHILIPP MEYER, The Son
He was a tight brisk little man, with the air of an arrant old bachelor. His nose was shaped like the bill of a parrot; his face slightly pitted with the smallpox, with a dry perpetual bloom on it, like a frost-bitten leaf in autumn. He had an eye of great quickness and vivacity, with a drollery and lurking waggery of expression that were irresistible.
—WASHINGTON IRVING, The Sketch Book
After fleeing to a nearby brasserie, Fiona and Pauline carefully examined the man in the photograph. His hair was gray-blond, windblown, and boyishly full. It fell onto his forehead and framed an angular face dominated by a small, rather cruel-looking mouth. The clothing was vaguely maritime: white trousers, a blue-striped oxford cloth shirt, a large diver’s wristwatch, canvas loafers with soles that would leave no marks on the deck of a ship. That was the kind of man he was, they decided. A man who left no marks.
—DANIEL SILVA, The English Girl
Aunt Julia was an inch or so taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face. Though she was stout in build and stood erect her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face, healthier than her sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a shriveled red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.
—JAMES JOYCE, “The Dead,” Dubliners
Her face swelled here. The musket ball moved there. The face bulged there. The musket ball moved here, neither capitulating, each doing a kind of death dance, with her soul as the anxious partner in waiting, until the musket ball quit the game, pushing its way out to the surface, where it bulged just above her left eye, a grotesque grape-sized lump. One night, lying on her back, she reached up to her left temple and felt it, just beneath the skin, and dug her fingers into the gouging mound of pus and blood until the awful gurgling mass of flesh popped open and the ball landed on the floor with a sharp ping as she passed out.
—JAMES MCBRIDE, Song Yet Sung
Once, calling at the Primrose Hill branch to take Melissa to lunch, he waited for her on a stool at the back of the shop and took it all in—Lenochka, the assistant with spiky cropped hair dyed black, lisping Russian-inflected Cockney through pierced-tongue jewelry, the piped Tchaikovsky, the scent of sandalwood, a general air of unmockable devotion to children and adults at play.
—IAN MCEWAN, Solar
The baroness gave him a flashing, brilliant smile. She was a woman of more than forty, but in a hard and glittering manner extremely beautiful. She was a high coloured blonde with golden hair of a metallic lustre, lovely no doubt but not attractive, and Ashenden had from the first reflected that it was not the sort of hair you would like to find in your soup. She had fine features, blue eyes, a straight nose, and a pink and white skin, but her skin was stretched over her bones a trifle tightly; she was generously décolletée and her white and ample bosom had the quality of marble.
—W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, “Miss King,” The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, vol. 1, East and West
The circumstances of Greg Fleniken’s death, as reported, were unremarkable. On the table before him was a 55-year-old Caucasian male who appeared to be in decent shape. After methodical inspection, the only marks Brown found on the body were a one-inch abrasion on his left cheek, where his face had hit the rug, and, curiously, a half-inch laceration of his scrotum. This was interesting. The sack itself was swollen and discolored, and around the wound was a small amount of edema fluid. The bruising had spread up through the groin area and across the right hip. Something had hit him hard.
—MARK BOWDEN, “The Body in Room 348,” Vanity Fair, May 2013
He was wearing mirrored sunglasses, a soft cap with a buttoned visor, white rubber boots, and yellow rubber overalls slashed at the crotch. Of middle height, blond and fine-featured, he had sandy hair around his ears and a large curl in back, like a breaking wave.
—JOHN MCPHEE, The Control of Nature
She willed herself to be strong, and when at last she met her real father, Cuyler Goodwill—he arrived at the Simcoe Street door with sweat on his brow, wearing an ill-fitting suit, looking disappointingly short and dark-complexioned—she braced herself for his kiss. It didn’t come, not on that first meeting. He never so much as took her hand. His face had a poor, pinchy look to it, but the mouth was kind.
—CAROL SHIELDS, The Stone Diaries
Back at the guest house Mrs. Starling introduced me to George Windus, who had sidewhiskers and baggy pants and a florid face. I suspected that Mrs. Starling hoped that Mr. Windus would ask the questions she was too timid to risk.
“What brings you to Teignmouth then?” Mr. Windus said. His nose was swollen, the color of the Burgundy he was drinking.
I was in publishing, I said. I had a week off. I was traveling along the coast.
—PAUL THEROUX, The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey around the Coast of Great Britain
He had a heavily muscled and sculpted physique, a neck wider than his head—including his ears. Sixteen years of pushups and sit ups and whatever exercise he could manage in his cell had given him a chest that easily extended beyond his chin, and biceps-triceps vises that looked like they could crush walnuts to powder. In the mug shots, his hair had always had a stylized fade. Now his head was clean-shaven and he had used his dome as a canvas for the Lord.
—MICHAEL CONNELLY, The Black Box
She hobbled around, leaning on a gnarled stick, muttering to herself in a language I could not quite understand. Her small withered face was covered with a net of wrinkles, and her skin was reddish brown like that of an overbaked apple. Her withered body constantly trembled as though shaken by some inner wind, and the fingers of her bony hands with joints twisted by disease never stopped quivering as her head on its long scraggy neck nodded in every direction.
Her sight was poor. She peered at the light through tiny slits embedded under thick eyebrows. Her lids were like furrows in deeply plowed soil. Tears were always spilling from the corners of her eyes, coursing down her face in well-worn channels to join glutinous threads hanging from her nose and the bubbly saliva dripping from her lips. She looked like an old green-gray puffball, rotten through and waiting for a last gust of wind to blow out the black dry dust from inside.
—JERZY KOSINSKI, The Painted Bird
Dr. Rau turns his plump face to Landsman. The irises of his eyes are like cast iron. “Based on my examination, I would guess that you are going through alcoholic withdrawal, Detective Landsman. In addition to exposure, you’re also suffering from dehydration, tremors, palpitations, and your pupils are enlarged. Your blood sugar is low, which tells me you probably haven’t been eating. Loss of appetite is another symptom of withdrawal. Your blood pressure is elevated, and your recent behavior appears to have been, from what I gather, quite erratic. Even violent.”
Landsman tugs on the wrinkled lapels of the collar of his chambray work shirt, trying to smooth them out. Like cheap window blinds, they keep rolling themselves up.
—MICHAEL CHABON, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Then, amid their laughter, the door opened, and several of the others came in—Eliza’s mother, a plain worn Scotchwoman, and Jim, a ruddy porcine young fellow, his father’s beardless twin, and Thaddeus, mild, ruddy, brown of hair and eye, bovine, and finally Greeley, the youngest, a boy with lapping idiot grins, full of strange squealing noises at which they laughed.
—THOMAS WOLFE, Look Homeward, Angel
So we listened to our Mooshum instead. While he talked, we sat on kitchen chairs and twisted our hair. Our mother had given him a red coffee can for spitting snoose. He wore soft, worn, green Sears work clothes, a pair of battered brown lace-up boots, and a twill cap, even in the house. His eyes shone from the slits cut deep into his face. The upper half of his left ear was missing, giving him a lopsided look. He was hunched and dried out, with random wisps of white hair down his ears and neck. From time to time, as he spoke, we glimpsed the murky scraggle of his teeth.
—LOUISE ERDRICH, The Plague of Doves
He was a comely, handsome fellow, perfectly well made, with straight strong limbs, not too large, tall and well-shaped, and, as I reckon, about twenty-six years of age. He had a very good countenance, not a fierce and surly aspect, but seemed to have something very manly in his face, and yet he had all the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance, too, especially when he smiled. His hair was long and black, not curled like wool; his forehead very high and large; and a great vivacity and sparkling sharpness in his eyes.
—DANIEL DEFOE, Robinson Crusoe
Ceiling fans stirred the thick humidity; little groups of Indian businessmen huddled together drinking glasses of fluorescent orange passionfruit juice. When the waiter came over I ordered a Tusker beer. “White Cap!” a man sang out at the table next to me. “White Cap is the only good beer in Kenya. It’s like a German beer!”
Joaquin Fechner was chubby and pale and wearing a khaki fishing vest over a pink shirt. He was sweating profusely, a Swiss native who’d been living in Africa for twenty-five years, and in Mombasa the past six. “Come join me,” he said.
—CARL HOFFMAN, The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes
The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets now of a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupil-less, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, Berenice
A foot scraped the staircase, a lazy S framed by a mahogany banister missing several spindles leading to an open second-floor hallway. I looked up at five and a half feet of clear brown skin in white shorts and a pink halter top that fell short of her navel and a longer way short of her collarbone, with piles of shimmering blue-black hair and toenails too pink for her natural coloring, in cork sandals. Her makeup was all wrong, too, her lips a candy-corn shade of orange. She’d use a spray gun to put on a perfume that probably came in a drum. She was all of fourteen years old.
—LOREN D. ESTLEMAN, Burning Midnight
Carey Carr wore spectacles and he had a cleft chin. At forty-two he still looked very young, with round plump cheeks and a prissy mouth, yet to people who knew him this air of cherubic vacancy and bloodlessness, at first so apparent, quickly faded: one knew that his face could reflect decision and an abiding passion.
—WILLIAM STYRON, Lie Down in Darkness
Mr. Squeer’s appearance was not prepossessing. He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two. The eye he had was unquestionably useful, but decidedly not ornamental, being of a greenish grey, and in shape resembling the fanlight of a street door. The blank side of his face was much wrinkled and puckered up, which gave him a very sinister appearance, especially when he smiled, at which times his expression bordered closely on the villainous. His hair was very flat and shiny, save at the ends, where it was brushed stiffly up from a low protruding forehead, which assorted well with his harsh voice and coarse manner. He was about two or three and fifty, and a trifle below the middle size; he wore a white neckerchief with long ends, and a suit of scholastic black, but his coat sleeves being a great deal too long, and his trousers a great deal too short, he appeared ill at ease in his clothes, and as if he were in a perpetual state of astonishment at finding himself so respectable.
—CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
After a long moment, Larry sat up. He was on the small side, with a puckish or faun-like quality to his face, which, depending on the light or how much he’d been partying, could look either as high-cheekboned as Rudolf Nureyev or as hollow-cheeked as the figure in Munch’s The Scream. Right now, it was somewhere in between.
—JEFFREY EUGENIDES, The Marriage Plot
Ransie was a narrow six feet of sallow brown skin and yellow hair. The imperturbability of the mountains hung upon him like a suit of armor. The woman was calicoed, angled, snuff-brushed, and weary with unknown desires. Through it all gleamed a faint protest of cheated youth unconscious of its loss.
—O. HENRY, “The Whirligig of Life,” Best Stories of O. Henry
He was a man of somewhat less than average height, inclined to corpulence, with his hair, worn long, arranged over the scalp so as to conceal his baldness. He was clean-shaven. His features were regular, and it was possible to imagine that in his youth he had been good-looking.
—W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, Of Human Bondage
He had the soft pink cheeks of an adolescent who almost never needed to shave; disheveled hair with the remnant of a part in the middle; wrinkled flannel trousers with a suggestion of a crease; frayed trouser cuffs pinched by metal bicycle clips; a belted double-breasted leather motorcycle jacket with an oversized collar turned up; a beige silk scarf knotted around his throat; motorcycle goggles down around his neck; a worn leather motorcycle bonnet, the kind someone might have worn when motorcycles were first invented, hanging from a wrist.
—ROBERT LITTELL, Young Philby
Her black hair cascaded over one clavicle, and the gesture she made of shaking it back and the dimple on her pale cheek were revelations with an element of immediate recognition about them. Her pallor shone. Her blackness blazed. The pleated skirts she liked were becomingly short. Even her bare limbs were so free from suntan that one’s gaze, stroking her white shins and forearms, could follow upon them the regular slants of fine dark hairs, the silks of her girlhood. The iridal dark-brown of her serious eyes had the enigmatic opacity of an Oriental hypnotist’s look (in a magazine’s back-page advertisement) and seemed to be placed higher than usual so that between its lower rim and the moist lower lid a cradle crescent of white remained when she stared straight at you. Her long eyelashes seemed blackened, and in fact were. Her features were saved from elfin prettiness by the thickish shape of her parched lips. Her plain Irish nose was Van’s in miniature. Her teeth were fairly white, but not very even.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Ada
Gerard’s face, describable as “rugged,” had been better characterised by his brother-in-law the art dealer as “cubist.” There were a number of strong dominant surfaces, a commanding bone structure, a square even brow, a nose that appeared to end in a blunt plane rather than a point.
—IRIS MURDOCH, The Book and the Brotherhood
In front of his stall sat the sickly-looking punk with the almost shaved head and bumpy headbones, smacking flies on his leg with a rolled-up comic. The boy was too young to be in anybody’s pay. He must belong to Nebraska. He had his father’s curving soapcake of a nose. His fingernail worked some red spot near his mouth corner.
—JAIMY GORDON, Lord of Misrule
(The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress, enters. She is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with tasselled selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen. On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings. Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted nostrils. She has large pendant beryl eardrops.)
BELLA: My word! I’m all of a mucksweat.
(She glances round her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with hard insistence. Her large fan winnows wind towards her heated faceneck and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.)
—JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses
There were all too many reasons George could need help at any given moment. One poorly propped pillow and his air passage could be cut off. A little vomit or even postnasal drip could asphyxiate him or slide down and infect his already damaged lungs.
—ALEX SHAKAR, Luminarium
Wolkowicz smiled, his old sardonic grin that narrowed his slanted eyes and lit up his shrewd muzhik face.
—CHARLES MCCARRY, The Last Supper
I’ve been in the Remake Center for more than three hours and I still haven’t met my stylist. Apparently he has no interest in seeing me until Venia and the other members of my prep team have addressed some obvious problems. This has included scrubbing down my body with a gritty foam that has removed not only dirt but at least three layers of skin, turning my nails into uniform shapes, and primarily, ridding my body of hair. My legs, arms, torso, underarms, and parts of my eyebrows have been stripped of the stuff, leaving me like a plucked bird, ready for roasting. I don’t like it. My skin feels sore and tingling and intensely vulnerable. But I have kept my side of the bargain with Haymitch, and no objection has crossed my lips.
—SUZANNE COLLINS, The Hunger Games
Everything about her person is honey-gold and warm in tone; the fair, crisply-trimmed hair which she wears rather long at the back, knotting it simply at the downy nape of her neck. This focuses the candid face of a minor muse with its smiling grey-green eyes. The calmly disposed hands have a deftness and shapeliness which one only notices when one sees them at work, holding a paint-brush perhaps or setting the broken leg of a sparrow in splints made from match-ends.
—LAWRENCE DURRELL, Justine
She tells me I look great, and I tell her she looks great, which she does, in her proudly unkempt way: her early white hair hangs past her shoulders, thick and flyaway; and she’s unapologetically frumpy in a mid-calf calico skirt and running shoes. She gave up vanity the way other people give up sugar, and her arms and hips and stomach are as soft and plump as bread dough.
—ANN PACKER, “Things Said or Done,” The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012
Avoid trouble. This was the operating principle of Abdul Hakim Husain, an idea so fiercely held that it seemed imprinted on his physical form. He had deep-set eyes and sunken cheeks, a body work-hunched and wiry—the type that claimed less than its fair share of space when threading through people-choked slumlanes. Almost everything about him was recessed save the pop-out ears and the hair that curled upward, girlish, whenever he wiped his forehead of sweat.
—KATHERINE BOO, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
His fatless, taut, weather-yellowed features, his deep eye sockets and long creased cheeks and dry gray hair were those of a man ending rather than beginning his forties. Jason was forty-two, like Carol. In his arms she looked young, and her broad hips suggested a relaxed and rounded fertility rather than middle-aged spread. Though Jason’s eyelids were lowered in their deep sockets, and seemed to shudder in the firelight, Carol’s blue eyes were alertly round and her face as pristine and blank as a china statuette’s each time the slow music turned her around so Ed could see her.
—JOHN UPDIKE, Couples
April Watts, who takes the other section, is like a teacher out of a Victorian novel: she has hair like brown cotton candy, whipped into a gauzy attenuated confection around her head, and bottle-bottom glasses through which she peers, vaguely, her blue eyes enlarged and distorted by the lenses like fishes in a tank. Although only in her early fifties, she wears support hose for her varicose veins and she has, poor ghastly thing, absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever.
—CLAIRE MESSUD, The Woman Upstairs
But in no regard was he more peculiar than in his personal appearance. He was singularly tall and thin. He stooped much. His limbs were exceedingly long and emaciated. His forehead was broad and low. His complexion was absolutely bloodless. His mouth was large and flexible, and his teeth were more wildly uneven, although sound, than I had ever before seen teeth in a human head. The expression of his smile, however, was by no means unpleasing, as might be supposed; but it had no variation whatever. It was one of profound melancholy—of a phaseless and unceasing gloom. His eyes were abnormally large, and round like those of a cat. The pupils, too, upon any accession or diminution of light, underwent contraction or dilation, just such as is observed in the feline tribe. In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous rays, not of a reflected but of an intrinsic lustre, as does a candle or the sun; yet their ordinary condition was so totally vapid, filmy, and dull, as to convey the idea of the eyes of a long-interred corpse.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” Complete Tales and Poems
The wrappings fell open. The face was translucent, pale, sunken, yet almost perfectly preserved. They had left his spectacles on the crooked nose: He felt amused derision. Dumbledore’s hands were folded upon his chest, and there it lay, clutched beneath them, buried with him.
—J. K. ROWLING, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Godfrey beetled his brows at him, and such was their tangled growth that there was a distinct illusion of salt wind and screaming seagulls.
—JOHN ASHBERY AND JAMES SCHUYLER, A Nest of Ninnies
You are the teacher, the incarnation of decrepit, laughingly out of touch with cool, yours the clothes that even Larry, Curly, and Moe said “yuck” to. You all but wear your hair in a comb-over, you’ve gone spongy in the belly, and you gobble goddamn Lipitor and Primvil because your body—some temple it is, Bunky—has turned on you in outright revolt.
—LEE K. ABBOTT, “One of Star Wars, One of Doom,” All Things, All at Once
His mother’s great chest was heaving painfully. Jimmie paused and looked down at her. Her face was inflamed and swollen from drinking. Her yellow brows shaded eyelids that had grown blue. Her tangled hair tossed in waves over her forehead. Her mouth was set in the same lines of vindictive hatred that it had, perhaps, borne during the fight. Her bare, red arms were thrown out above her head in an attitude of exhaustion, something, mayhap, like that of a sated villain.
—STEPHEN CRANE, “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Fiction
She thought how nice-looking he was, and how he seemed to be so unaware of it. He wore a brush cut, in the style of the time—particularly if you were anything like an engineer—and his light-colored skin was never flushed like hers, never blotchy from the sun, but evenly tanned whatever the season.
—ALICE MUNRO, “To Reach Japan,” Dear Life
The only end in sight was Yossarian’s own, and he might have remained in the hospital until doomsday had it not been for that patriotic Texan with his infundibuliform jowls and his lumpy, rumpleheaded, indestructible smile cracked forever across the front of his face like the brim of a black ten-gallon hat.
—JOSEPH HELLER, Catch-22
Madame Merle was a tall, fair, plump woman; everything in her person was round and replete, though without those accumulations which minister to indolence. Her features were thick, but there was a graceful harmony among them, and her complexion had a healthy clearness. She had a small grey eye, with a great deal of light in it—an eye incapable of dullness, and, according to some people, incapable of tears; and a wide, firm mouth, which, when she smiled, drew itself upward to the left side, in a manner that most people thought very odd, some very affected, and a few very graceful. Isabel inclined to range herself in the last category. Madame Merle had thick, fair hair, which was arranged with picturesque simplicity, and a large white hand, of a perfect shape—a shape so perfect that its owner, preferring to leave it unadorned, wore no rings.
—HENRY JAMES, The Portrait of a Lady
It appeared, indeed, from the countenance of this proprietor, that he was of a frank, but hasty and choleric, temper. He was not above the middle stature, but broad-shouldered, long-armed, and powerfully made, like one accustomed to endure the fatigue of war or of the chase; his face was broad, with large blue eyes, open and frank features, fine teeth, and a well-formed head, although expressive of that sort of good humour which often lodges with a sudden and hasty temper. Pride and jealousy there was in his eye, for his life had been spent in asserting rights which were constantly liable to invasion; and the prompt, fiery, and resolute disposition of the man had been kept constantly upon the alert by the circumstances of his situation. His long yellow hair was equally divided on the top of his head and upon his brow, and combed down on each side to the length of his shoulders: it had but little tendency to grey, although Cedric was approaching to his sixtieth year.
—SIR WALTER SCOTT, Ivanhoe
Her History of the United States, of Republic of America had proven sufficiently profitable to make her financially independent. She was a statuesque woman of “classic features”—a Roman nose gave her a particularly strong profile—and in her role as a schoolmistress, she dressed invariably in the finest black silk or satin, her head crowned with a white turban.
—DAVID MCCULLOUGH, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris
At nineteen, I was a hatless type, with a flat, black, not particularly clean, Continental-type pompadour over a badly broken-out inch of forehead.
—J. D. SALINGER, “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” Nine Stories
Therefore Ikey’s corniform, be-spectacled nose and narrow, knowledge-bowed figure was well known in the vicinity of the Blue Light, and his advice and notice were much desired.
—O. HENRY, “The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein,” The Best of O. Henry
The sound of her voice was driving me mad. Its raspiness was so exotic, so utterly feminine. Not under any circumstances would I have taken it for a man’s voice laboring to sound womanly. It was a raspy voice, but not a throaty or harsh-sounding one. It was more like the sound of bare feet softly walking on gravel.
—CARLOS CASTANEDA, The Art of Dreaming
Two young men, taller than most, loped across the grassy quad in front of the library, in a hurry. One of them, a six-foot-three freshman named Roger Morris, had a loose, gangly build; a tousle of dark hair with a forelock that perpetually threatened to fall over his long face; and heavy black eyebrows that lent him, at first glance, a bit of a glowering look. The other young man, Joe Rantz, also a freshman, was nearly as tall, at six foot two and a half, but more tautly built, with broad shoulders and solid, powerful legs. He wore his blond hair in a crew cut. He had a strong jawline, fine, regular features, gray eyes verging into blue, and he drew covert glances from many of the young women sitting on the grass.
—DANIEL JAMES BROWN, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
Her position before was sheltered from the light: now, I had a distinct view of her whole figure and countenance. She was slender, and apparently scarcely past girlhood: an admirable form, and the most exquisite little face that I have ever had the pleasure of beholding: small features, very fair; flaxen ringlets, or rather golden, hanging loose on her delicate neck; and eyes—had they been agreeable in expression, they would have been irresistible—fortunately for my susceptible heart, the only sentiment they evinced hovered between scorn and a kind of desperation, singularly unnatural to be detected there.
—EMILY BRONTË, Wuthering Heights
Nora Johnson thought that men might regard travel as fast. Men preferred to marry safer, calmer women. Women who didn’t go gallivanting too much. It was only sensible to have advance information about men, Nora Johnson told her daughters. This way you could go armed into the struggle.
—MAEVE BINCHY, Tara Road
The lieutenant walked in front of his men with an air of bitter distaste. He might have been chained to them unwillingly—perhaps the scar on his jaw was the relic of an escape. His gaiters were polished, and his pistol-holster: his buttons were all sewn on. He had a sharp crooked nose jutting out of a lean dancer’s face; his neatness gave an effect of inordinate ambition in the shabby city.
—GRAHAM GREENE, The Power and the Glory
I meet few American academics, and was pleasantly surprised that this one was bored by Bloomsbury, and happy to leave the modern movement to his younger and more ambitious colleagues. But then Ed Winterton liked to present himself as a failure. He was in his early forties, balding, with a pinky glabrous complexion and square rimless spectacles: the banker type of academic, circumspect and moral. He bought English clothes without looking at all English. He remained the sort of American who always wears a mackintosh in London because he knows that in this city rain falls out of a clear sky.
—JULIAN BARNES, Flaubert’s Parrot
He looked fixedly at the young woman, who squirmed and cast her eyes nervously to the fields. A smattering of freckles across her nose and forehead interrupted what was otherwise pale skin. Her eyes were brown and widely set, and there was a large gap between her front teeth. There was something ungainly about her, Blöndal decided. He noted the thick crescents of dirt under her fingernails.
—HANNAH KENT, Burial Rites
Billie, however, is obviously a native of these parts, a short pudgy person in, I judge, her middle to late thirties. She really is of a remarkable shape, and might have been assembled from a collection of cardboard boxes of varying sizes that were first left out in the rain and then piled soggily any old way one on top of another. The general effect was not improved by the extremely tight jeans she was wearing, and the black polo-necked jumper that made her large head look like a rubber ball set squarely atop all those precariously stacked cartons.
—JOHN BANVILLE, Ancient Light
You must picture Mr. Thomas Marvel as a person of copious, flexible visage, a nose of cylindrical protrusion, a liquorish, ample, fluctuating mouth, and a beard of bristling eccentricity. His figure inclined to embonpoint; his short limbs accentuated this inclination.
—H. G. WELLS, The Invisible Man
Drenka was a dark, Italian-looking Croat from the Dalmatian coast, on the short side like Sabbath, a full, firmly made woman at the provocative edge of being just overweight, her shape, at her heaviest, reminiscent of those clay figurines molded circa 2000 B.C., fat little dolls with big breasts and big thighs unearthed all the way from Europe down to Asia Minor and worshiped under a dozen different names as the great mother of the gods. She was pretty in a rather efficient, businesslike way, except for her nose, a surprisingly bridgeless prizefighter’s nose that created a sort of blur at the heart of her face, a nose slightly out of plumb with the full mouth and the large dark eyes, and the telltale sign, as Sabbath came to view it, of everything malleable and indeterminate in her seemingly well-deployed nature.
—PHILIP ROTH, Sabbath’s Theater
One was rather short and very stoutly built, with a big bullet-shaped head, a bristly grey moustache, and small pale-blue eyes, a trifle bloodshot. The other was a slender young fellow, of middle height, dark in complexion, and bearing himself with grace and distinction.
—ANTHONY HOPE, The Prisoner of Zenda
Victor Van Allen was thirty-six years old, inclined to a general firm rotundity rather than fat, and he had thick, crisp brown eyebrows that stood out over innocent blue eyes. His brown hair was straight, closely cut, and like his eyebrows, thick and tenacious. His mouth was middle-sized, firm, and usually drawn down at the right corner with a lop-sided determination or with humor, depending on how one cared to take it.
—PATRICIA HIGHSMITH, Deep Water
He was pale as salt. Although along his jaw there was, beneath the pale skin, the outline of a black beard. His hair was cut short, but it was clear that left to its own devices it would curve, and then curl. He was not tall, but the fingers that held his hand against his overcoat were exceptionally long and thin. She saw how they moved one at a time against the dark brown felt, pressing themselves against the fabric almost imperceptibly, like a pulse under the skin. The way a child’s fingers might move in sleep.
—ALICE MCDERMOTT, After This
Sometimes, when a fierce wind blows out of the north, the faces of the scurrying citizens, drawn tight by the bluster of it, all seem to acquire a Lappish look, their eyes rather slanted, their cheekbones heightened, their skulls apparently narrowed, until they too, tending as they often do anyway toward an ideal androgyny, seem like a species devised especially for the setting by fablers or geneticists.
—JAN MORRIS, Journeys
Moore wore a splendid black silk robe with a gold lamé collar and belt. He sports a full mustache above an imperial, and his hair, sleeked down under pomade when he opens operations, invariably rises during the contest, as it gets water sloshed on it between rounds and the lacquer washes off, until it is standing up like the top of a shaving brush.
—A. J. LIEBLING, “Ahab and Nemesis,” The Sweet Science and Other Writings
I can still see Hassan up on that tree, sunlight flickering through the leaves on his almost perfectly round face, a face like a Chinese doll chiseled from hardwood: his flat, broad nose and slanting, narrow eyes like bamboo leaves, eyes that looked, depending on the light, gold, green, even sapphire. I can still see his tiny low-set ears and that pointed stub of a chin, a meaty appendage that looked like it was added as a mere afterthought. And the cleft lip, just left of midline, where the Chinese doll maker’s instrument may have slipped, or perhaps he had simply grown tired and careless.
—KHALED HOSSEINI, The Kite Runner
When they announced the arrival of flight #894 from Toledo I followed my mother to the gate. I knew it was them right away. I knew it by the way they walked down the airplane stairs, clutching each other. And when they got closer I knew it by my grandmother’s shoes—black with laces and fat heels—old lady shoes. My grandfather had white hair around the edges and none on top. He was shorter and fatter than my grandmother.
They looked around a bit before my mother called out, “Here we are—over here.”
They walked toward us, growing more excited as they recognized my mother. She gave each of them a short hug. I just stood there feeling dumb until my grandmother said, “And this must be Margaret Ann.”
—JUDY BLUME, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
In response, the woman reached up and slowly lifted the veil from her face. She was strikingly beautiful, and yet older than Langdon had imagined—in her sixties perhaps, stately and strong, like a timeless statue. She had a sternly set jaw, deep soulful eyes, and long, silver-gray hair that cascaded over her shoulders in ringlets. An amulet of lapis lazuli hung around her neck—a single snake coiled around a staff.
—DAN BROWN, Inferno
He was taller than Gustav, a thin man with rough-cut dark-grey hair and beard and an aquiline nose. He turned by chance and faced us and I had a full view of his gaunt face. What surprised me was its fierceness. A severity that was almost savagery. I had never seen a face that expressed such violent determination never to compromise, never to deviate. Never to smile. And what eyes! They were slightly ex-ophthalmic, of the most startling cold blue. Beyond any doubt, insane eyes.
—JOHN FOWLES, The Magus
Her skin had the transparent shine of glycerine soap, and her eyes bulged ever so slightly, possibly from the effort of trying to emote when every associated muscle had been pumped full of botulinum or lasered into submission. Her thinning orange hair was gelled into a hard pompadour, like the crust on crème brûlée.
—LAUREN BEUKES, Zoo City
When he appeared at my door four years ago, I knew nothing about him and he didn’t offer much. He wore gray wool trousers and a seersucker jacket that was lightly stained on the breast pocket. His clothes were pressed and his salt hair was combed and brilloed into place. He’d shaved too, but on a face so weathered it didn’t do much in the way of brightening or smoothing. He had hazel eyes that squinted from the anticipation of glare. He was no more than five foot eight.
—AMY GRACE LOYD, The Affairs of Others
Dominating the scene by his height and force was Nathan: broad-shouldered, powerful-looking, crowned with a shock of hair swarthy as a Sioux’s, he resembled a more attenuated and frenetic John Garfield, with Garfield’s handsome, crookedly agreeable face—theoretically agreeable, I should say, for now the face was murky with passion and rage, was quite emphatically anything but agreeable, suffused as it was with such an obvious eagerness for violence. He wore a light sweater and slacks and appeared to be in his late twenties. He held Sophie’s arm tight in his grasp, and she flinched before his onslaught like a rosebud quivering in a windstorm. Sophie I could barely see in the dismal light. I was able to discern only her disheveled mane of straw-colored hair and, behind Nathan’s shoulder, about a third of her face. This included a frightened eyebrow, a small mole, a hazel eye, and a broad lovely swerve of Slavic cheekbone across which a single tear rolled like a drop of quicksilver.
—WILLIAM STYRON, Sophie’s Choice
“Fortune be with you,” I told Marco, though I knew well enough that he’d lose, and snapped my cards together. Old worn cards by now, frayed about the edges and greasy with thumb marks and wine stains, but I’d made good money from them over the years. I might look like a seedy fellow down on his luck—my leather doublet was battered, my shirt had patches on the threadbare elbows, and the hose stretching over my crooked legs fit very ill—but it didn’t do for a dwarf to look prosperous. We’re easy enough marks as it is without wearing embroidered sleeves or fine cloaks.
—KATE QUINN, The Serpent and the Pearl: A Novel of the Borgias
He runs his finger down her nose, a long straight nose, rather flat, like their father’s. Sadie looks—or looked—like him, much more than Luke does, the long oval face, angular jaw, the deep-set flashing eyes, and perfect, perfect teeth behind full lips, though Sadie’s lips rarely stopped quivering, working something over and over, always working something.
—MICHELLE LATIOLAIS, A Proper Knowledge
The reddleman turned his head, and replied in sad and occupied tones. He was young, and his face, if not exactly handsome, approached so near to handsome that nobody would have contradicted an assertion that it really was so in its natural colour. His eye, which glared so strangely through his stain, was in itself attractive—keen as that of a bird of prey, and blue as autumn mist. He had neither whisker nor moustache, which allowed the soft curves of the lower part of his face to be apparent. His lips were thin, and though, as it seemed, compressed by thought, there was a pleasant twitch at their corners now and then.
—THOMAS HARDY, The Return of the Native
His fingers, crept up to his chin, squeezed it tenderly, like a piece of fruit. A clear delineation existed between his neck and face, but still his chin was not the strong, crisp, masculine escarpment it should be. The problem was that there was a smidge too much softness underneath his chin, a yielding swag of flesh he had possessed since childhood that tended to swallow the lower edge of his jawline, especially if he wasn’t careful and pulled his head back into his neck. Weak chins were for weak men, symptomatic of cowardice, corruption, deviant appetites, and poor breeding, and he was forced to conclude that, both on a cosmetic level and as a sign of his essence, his mandibular failings made his less attractive than he might have been with a perfect, Gregory Peck kind of chin.
—MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD, Seating Arrangements
But that sour face of her elderly fury keeps disappearing just as she disappeared. Even this latest face, the one propped on the hospital pillow, the hieratic visage that seems polished and will soon be an object, even this one is hard to keep in focus. I’m sitting here, holding her hand, but it’s the ardent face from 1936 that keeps appearing, the face in the photograph placed on the shelf above the piano all the years of my girlhood and beyond. Heart-shaped with high cheekbones and eyes set wonderfully wide, it is the face of a romantic lead.
—PATRICIA HAMPL, The Florist’s Daughter
She looked about twenty-six and as if she hadn’t slept very well. She had a tired, pretty little face under fluffed-out brown hair, a rather narrow forehead with more height than is considered elegant, a small inquisitive nose, an upper lip a shade too long and a mouth more than a shade too wide. Her eyes could be very blue if they tried. She looked quiet, but not mousy-quiet. She looked smart, but not Hollywood-smart.
—RAYMOND CHANDLER, “Mandarin’s Jade,” Killer in the Rain
“I heard you, David. And I’ve already heard that Mr. Lincoln’s here.” Mrs. Surratt was a handsome auburn-haired woman with a body that David, who read romantic stories in yellow covers, knew was Junoesque. In some ways, he found Mrs. Surratt more to his taste than her daughter; and this curious preference convinced him that he was probably the monster of depravity that his seven sisters liked to claim he was.
—GORE VIDAL, Lincoln
She was not more than twenty at the time of independence. She had the flattish, vaguely Asian face that some Sena people had, the high cheekbones, the slanted hooded eyes. Her shaven head revealed its sculptural symmetries, her neck was slender and fragile-seeming. She was very thin, with tight muscles in her arms and legs that gave her a loose springy walk, her small high buttocks beating against her swinging skirt or her wraparound, the red chitenje she sometimes wore.
—PAUL THEROUX, The Lower River
Tom was of that bull-terrier type so common in England; sturdy, and yet not coarse; middle-sized, deep-chested, broad-shouldered; with small, well-knit hands and feet, large jaw, bright gray eyes, crisp brown hair, a heavy projecting brow; his face full of shrewdness and good-nature, and of humor withal, which might be at whiles a little saucy and sarcastic, to judge from the glances which he sent forth from the corners of his wicked eyes at his companion on the other side of the window.
—CHARLES KINGSLEY, Two Years Ago
Flat padded faces, flattish noses, and “double” upper eyelids—the epicanthic folds—appear to be adapted to protect the exposed and vulnerable face and eyes from cold.
—M. F. ASHLEY MONTAGU, Introduction to Physical Anthropology
. . . I record that Doctor Aziz was a tall man. Pressed flat against a wall of his family home, he measured twenty-five bricks (a brick for each year of his life) or just over six foot two. A strong man also. His beard was thick and red—and annoyed his mother, who said only Hajis, men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, should grow red beards. His hair, however, was rather darker. His sky-eyes you know about. Ingrid had said, “They went mad with the colors when they made your face.” But the central feature of my grandfather’s anatomy was neither color nor height, neither strength of arm nor straightness of back. There it was, reflected in the water, undulating like a mad plantain in the centre of his face . . . Aadam Aziz, waiting for Tai, watches his rippling nose.
—SALMAN RUSHDIE, Midnight’s Children
Physical features, as best I remember them. He was fair, a good average height and strongly built though not stout. Brown hair and moustache—very small this. Extremely well-kept hands. A good smile though when not smiling his face wore a somewhat quizzical almost impertinent air. His eyes were hazel and the best feature of him—they looked into other eyes, into other ideas, with a real candour, rather a terrifying sort of lucidity. He was somewhat untidy in dress but always spotlessly clean of person and abhorred dirty nails and collars. Yes, but his clothes were sometimes stained with spots of the red ink in which he wrote. There!
—LAWRENCE DURRELL, Balthazar