How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Ethan Figman, thick bodied, unusually ugly, his features appearing a little bit flattened, as if pressed against a mime's invisible glass wall, sat with his mouth slack and a record album in his lap. (1.14)
How can someone be unusually ugly? Does that mean there's a usual kind of ugliness?
Quote #2
Goodman was big and blunt and unsettling; Ash was waifish, open-hearted, a beauty with long, straight, pale brown hair and sad eyes. (1.25)
Okay… so Goodman is blunt and unsettling? That's pretty much a blatant tie in to his personality and later actions. Also, this description sounds like a classic Beauty and the Beast kind of dynamic.
Quote #3
As Julie, she's always felt all wrong; she was gangling, and her skin went pink and patchy at the least provocation […] Her deer-colored hair had […] a poodle bigness that mortified her. (1.28)
Check this out: Jules's opinion of her appearance changes dramatically when her name changes. As Julie she's awkward, but as Jules her looks are described as quirky.
Quote #4
He had probably reasoned that they were at the same level […] People would accept them as a couple; it made both logical and aesthetic sense. (1.125)
This seems like a ridiculous idea, but is it ever true in real life? Do people of similar levels of beauty really tend to end up together?
Quote #5
At fifty [Ethan] was as deeply homely as he'd been at fifteen, but his curls had thinned out and turned a kind of burned goldish silver, and his homeliness gave him cachet. (3.7)
In this book, appearance and attractiveness (or lack of it) is a kind of currency that can earn—or lose you—prestige.
Quote #6
Robert was small and handsome with spiky black baby-chick hair, and built like a compact action figure. (4.28)
"Baby-chick hair" is not usually something you'd think of to describe a handsome person, but we're assuming it's favorable given the rest of his description.
Quote #7
While she was still beautiful, with a physical appearance like no one else's mother, she no longer resembled the winsome hippie girl in the poncho he recalled from his early childhood. (6.75)
Susannah's appearance is like no one else's mother… because she's like no one else's mother. She looks like that because her work (which is half appearance) demands it.
Quote #8
Goodman […] did not appear boyish or defenseless. […] Jules dragged up the word sinew from somewhere in her vocabulary. (9.104).
They actually recommend Goodman stay in Iceland because his appearance would bias a jury against him—but does he ever look "boyish or defenseless"? Sinew is a reference to tough bodily tissue… not exactly the stuff of innocence.
Quote #9
It didn't matter to them that she, a middle-aged woman with a sweater draped over her T-shirt and the kind of softened, undefined features that their mothers shared, had once been a camper here. (18.9)
The appearance of age pushes people to the outside in a way that something like Ethan's ugliness never does. Why?
Quote #10
It was actually a terrible look, seedy and truculent. […] His handsomeness was entirely gone from him. Goodman seemed not to know it, though; no one had told him. (20.34)
When it comes to appearances, which matters more: what others think, or what a person does? Consider this quote alongside the one earlier in this section about Julie's transformation into Jules.