I am reading (and loving) Jonathan Tropper’s How to Talk to a Widower right now and came across this passage on beauty that I think so eloquently nails it:
She turns sideways in her seat and looks at me for a long moment… Something I didn’t notice before: just at the edge of Brooke’s upper lip, an old acne scar that eats slightly into the meat of her upper lip, disrupting its curve, forming a small swirl of off-color scar tissue there. But that works just fine for me. Perfection is plastic, cold, and unyielding. Real beauty is a current that has to be grounded, and it’s these little defects that do it. You need context, a reference point. Her scarred upper lip is the hook, the default nucleus from which everything else radiates.
