Daily Inspiration Quote by Mary Wesley

Wesley’s “deliberately” is doing the heavy lifting here: it signals craft, not omission. By refusing to pin Sylvester and Julia to eye color, cheekbones, and the usual catalog of “relatable” details, she’s asserting control over what matters in the scene - and what doesn’t. It’s a quiet rebuke to the novelistic habit of treating bodies as evidence, as if a person’s moral temperature can be read off their jawline.

The subtext is democratic and slightly mischievous. Wesley invites complicity: the reader will supply faces, and those faces will inevitably be shaped by taste, bias, class codes, and private fantasies. That means the characters arrive already “cast” by the audience, smuggling in assumptions the author can then exploit or undercut. Leaving appearance blank isn’t neutrality; it’s a trapdoor into the reader’s psychology.

Contextually, this lands as a late-20th-century, post-realism maneuver, but it also fits Wesley’s broader reputation for stripping away polite surfaces to get at appetites, power, and social hypocrisy. When a novelist declines to describe looks, she often doubles down on behavior and dialogue - the things you can’t accessorize. It keeps the spotlight on how Sylvester and Julia act, what they want, and how they wound or charm each other, rather than how cinematically they might be imagined.

The line also carries a whiff of resistance to adaptation culture: don’t audition them for a screen; meet them on the page, where desire and dread are harder to costume.