Top 100 Anthony Powell Quotes
#1. So often one thinks that individuals and situations cannot be so extraordinary as they seem from outside: only to find that the truth is a thousand times odder.
Anthony Powell
#2. Did you ever hear him in Lohengrin?' demanded Pardoe, taking the ends of his own moustache with both hands, as if about to tear it off and reveal himself in a new identity.
Anthony Powell
#3. It is, after all, envy rather than jealousy that causes most of the trouble in married life.
Anthony Powell
#4. People can only be themselves,' she said. 'If they possessed the qualities you desire in them, they would be different people.'
'That is what I should like them to be.
Anthony Powell
#5. In leaving behind the kind of shell common to all undergraduates, indeed to most young men, they had, in one sense, taken more definite shape by each establishing conspicuously his own individual identity, thereby automatically drawing farther apart from each other.
Anthony Powell
#6. The exaggerated dramatic force employed by Umfraville in presenting his narrative made it hard to know what demeanour best to adopt in listening to the story. Tragedy might at any moment give way to farce, so that the listener had always to keep his wits about him.
Anthony Powell
#7. In fact the original memory of Miss Blaides returned to me one morning when I was sitting in my cream distempered, strip-lighted, bare, sanitary, glaring, forlorn little cell at the Studio. In that place it was possible to know deep despondency.
Anthony Powell
#8. I was relieved to find her attitude to myself suggested nothing more hostile than complete indifference.
Anthony Powell
#9. His turn-out was emphatically excellent, and he diffused waves of personality, strong, chilling gusts of icy air, a protective element that threatened to freeze into rigidity all who came through the door, before they could approach him nearer.
Anthony Powell
#10. It was [Hugh's] omnipresent fear that some woman might be foisted on him who would turn out to be an adventuress and would blackmail him. This preoccupation made it almost impossible for him to engage a secretary.
Anthony Powell
#11. A company commander,' said Dicky Umfraville, when we met later that year, 'needs the qualifications of a ringmaster in a first-class circus, and a nanny in a large family.
Anthony Powell
#12. His daughters had lived their early life in permanent disgrace for having, none of them, been born a boy.
Anthony Powell
#13. There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
Anthony Powell
#14. There is a strong disposition in youth, from which some individuals never escape, to suppose that everyone else is having a more enjoyable time than we are ourselves;
Anthony Powell
#15. Emotional crises always promote the urgent need for executive action, so that the times when we most hope to be free from the practical administration of life are always those when the need to cope with a concrete world is more than ever necessary.
Anthony Powell
#16. Maclintick's calculatedly humdrum appearance, although shabby, seemed aimed at concealing bohemian affiliations.
Anthony Powell
#17. In those days children were rather out of fashion.
Anthony Powell
#18. There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other.
Anthony Powell
#19. Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.
Anthony Powell
#21. He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Self-love seems so often unrequited.
Anthony Powell
#23. One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.
Anthony Powell
#24. I was somewhat put out to find that recurrent projections in the mind of the images of either of them, Jean or Suzette, did not in the least exclude that of the other. That was when I began to suspect that being in love might be a complicated affair.
Anthony Powell
#25. Where, as again Vaughan writes, the liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies.
Anthony Powell
#26. In any case, I had been one of them. If her lovers were horrifying, I too had been of their order. That had to be admitted. 'It is no good pontificating,' Mr Deacon used to say, 'about other people's sexual tastes.
Anthony Powell
#27. So aggressive was the manner in which this question was put that at first I thought the pair of them were probably drunk: a state which, in addition, the discrepancy between their respective heights for some reason quite illogically helped to suggest.
Anthony Powell
#28. Verbal description of everything, however, must remain infinitely distant from the thing itself, overstatement and understatement sometimes hitting off the truth better than a flat assertion of bare fact.
Anthony Powell
#29. He [Widmerpool] moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.
Anthony Powell
#30. Clearly some complicated process of sorting-out was in progress among those who surrounded me: though only years later did I become aware how early such voluntary segregations begin to develop; and of how they continue throughout life.
Anthony Powell
#31. One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.
Anthony Powell
#32. Why are you so stuck up?' she asked, truculently.
'I'm just made that way.'
'You ought to fight it.'
'I can't see why.
Anthony Powell
#33. I passed through empty streets, thinking that I, too, should be married soon, a change that presented itself in terms of action rather than reflection, the mood in which even the most prudent often marry: a crisis of delight and anxiety, excitement and oppression.
Anthony Powell
#35. The education of the will is the end of human life.
Anthony Powell
#36. Some persons feel drawn towards those who dislike them, or are at least determined to overcome opposition of that sort.
Anthony Powell
#37. That answer was such a simple one that I could not imagine why I had not guessed it without having to be told. Those very obvious tactical victories are always the victories least foreseen by the onlooker, still less the opponent.
Anthony Powell
#38. What a shabby lot of highbrows have turned out tonight," he said, when he saw us. "It makes me ashamed to be one.
Anthony Powell
#39. A woman's power of imitation and adaptation make her capable of confronting you with your own arguments after even the briefest acquaintance: how much more so if a state of intimacy exists.
Anthony Powell
#40. Of this crisis in my life, I remember chiefly a sense of tremendous inevitability, a feeling that fate was settling its own problems, and too much reflection would be out of place.
Anthony Powell
#41. One always imagines things happen in hot blood,' he said. 'An ill-considered remark starts a row. Hard words follow, misunderstandings. Matters that can be put right in the end. Unfortunately life doesn't work out like that. First of all there is no row, secondly, nothing can be put right.
Anthony Powell
#42. I wonder whether what we call politeness isn't just weakness
Anthony Powell
#43. Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep;
Anthony Powell
#44. Barbara stumbled, and, for a brief second, took my arm. It was then, perhaps, that a force was released, no less powerful for its action proving somewhat delayed; for emotions of that kind are not always immediately grasped.
Anthony Powell
#45. In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.
Anthony Powell
#46. I was far from understanding that the capacity of men interested in power is not necessarily expressed in the brilliance of their conversation.
Anthony Powell
#47. ON his way out of the museum Atwater passed Nosworth, arguing in the evening sunshine with a party of negroes, who stood about him in ungainly positions, near in spirit to the Anglo-Saxon attitudes of First Messenger.
Anthony Powell
#48. Widmerpool had tidied himself up a little since leaving school, though there was still a kind of exotic drabness about his appearance that seemed to mark him out from the rest of mankind.
Anthony Powell
#49. It doesn't do to read too much,' Widmerpool said. 'You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.
Anthony Powell
#50. Brains and hard work are of very little avail, Jenkins, unless you know the right people.
Anthony Powell
#51. Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.
Anthony Powell
#52. She scarcely spoke at all and might have been one of those huge dolls which, when inclined backwards, say "Ma-ma" or "Pa-pa": though impossible to imagine in any position so undignified as that required for the mechanism to produce these syllables.
Anthony Powell
#55. Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests.
Anthony Powell
#56. He seemed about to speak; then, as if he could not give sufficient weight to the words while we walked, he stopped and faced me.
Anthony Powell
#57. Although not always simultaneous in taking effect, nor necessarily at all equal in voltage, the process of love is rarely unilateral. When the moment comes, a secret attachment is often returned with interest. Some know this by instinct; others learn in a hard school.
Anthony Powell
#58. Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.
Anthony Powell
#60. However, obeying that law that requires most people to minimise to a superior a misfortune which, to an inferior, they would magnify, Widmerpool thrust his head through the open window of the car, and, smiling reverentially, gave an assurance that all was well.
Anthony Powell
#61. If certain individuals fall in love from motives of convenience, they can be contrasted with plenty of others in whom passion seems principally aroused by the intensity of administrative difficulties in procuring its satisfaction.
Anthony Powell
#62. Esteem for the army - never in this country regarded, in the continental manner, as a popular expression of the national will - implies a kind of innocence.
Anthony Powell
#63. An exceedingly well-informed report,' said the General. 'You have given yourself the trouble to go into matters thoroughly, I see. That is one of the secrets of success in life.
Anthony Powell
#64. He spoke in that reminiscent, unctuous voice men use when they tell you that sort of thing more to savour an enjoyable past situation, than to impart information which might be of interest.
Anthony Powell
#65. Only an atmosphere of quiet hard work and dull, serious conversation were appropriate to him.
Anthony Powell
#66. Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.
Anthony Powell
#67. Reason is given to all men, but all men do not know how to use it. Liberty is offered to each one of us, but few learn to be free. Such gifts are, in any case, a right to be earned, not a privilege for the shiftless.
Anthony Powell
#68. It seemed to me he was well rid of Maureen, if she really was disturbing him to the extent that it appeared; but being judicious about other people's love affairs is easy, often merely a sign one has not understood their force or complexity.
Anthony Powell
#69. His physical attitude suggested a holy man doing penance vicariously for the sin of those in his spiritual care.
Anthony Powell
#70. Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.
Anthony Powell
#71. The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.
Anthony Powell
#72. When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.
Anthony Powell
#73. The army is at once the worst place for egoists, and the best.
Anthony Powell
#74. We took a bus to Victoria, then passed on foot into a vast, desolate region of stucco streets and squares upon which a doom seemed to have fallen. The gloom was cosmic.
Anthony Powell
#75. Well,' said Mrs. Erdleigh, speaking kindly, as if to a child who has proposed a game inevitably associated with the breakage of china, 'I know trouble will come of it if we do.
Anthony Powell
#77. One's associations with people are regulated as much by what they stand for, as by what they are, individual characteristics becoming from time to time submerged in more general implications.
Anthony Powell
#78. Perhaps these are inward irritations always produced by love: the acutely sensitive nerves of intimacy: the haunting fear that all may not go well.
Anthony Powell
#79. When Quiggin ingratiated himself with people - during his days as secretary to St. John Clarke, for example - he was far too shrewd to confine himself to mere flattery. A modicum of bullying was a pleasure both to himself and his patrons.
Anthony Powell
#80. In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame.
Anthony Powell
#81. In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.
Anthony Powell
#82. I always think one ought to be grateful to an author if one has liked even a small bit of a book.
Anthony Powell
#83. Love is at once always absurd and never absurd; the more grotesque its form, the more love itself confers a certain dignity on the circumstances of those it torments.
Anthony Powell
#84. One's capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age.
Anthony Powell
#85. As a rule Uncle Giles took not the slightest interest in anyone or anything except himself and his own affairs - indeed was by this time all but incapable of absorbing even the smallest particle of information about others, unless such information had some immediate bearing on his own case.
Anthony Powell
#86. Lady Warminster was a woman among women,' said Mrs Erdleigh. 'I shall never forget her gratitude when I revealed to her that Tuesday was the best day for the operation of revenge.
Anthony Powell
#87. It's no more normal to be a bank-manager or a bus-conductor, than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan,' Moreland had once remarked. 'It just happens there are more of the former types.
Anthony Powell
#88. I'm not a religious chap. I don't know anything about that sort of thing. But there must be something beyond all this sex business.' 'Yes.' 'You think so?' 'Oh yes. Quite likely. Why not?' 'But what?' 'I can't help.' 'You can't.
Anthony Powell
#89. I indicated that I wrote for the papers, not mentioning books because, if not specifically in your line, authorship is an embarrassing subject for all concerned. Besides, it never sounds like a serious occupation.
Anthony Powell
#90. Like many persons more interested in power than sensual enjoyment, Sillery touched no strong drink.
Anthony Powell
#91. Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.
Anthony Powell
#92. The message of the bell, the singer's tragic tone announcing it, underlined life's inflexible call to order, reaffirming the illusory nature of love and pleasure.
Anthony Powell
#93. But he also looked as if by then he knew what worry was, something certainly unknown to him in the past.
Anthony Powell
#94. They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain.
Anthony Powell
#95. I did not, however, as yet see him as one of those symbolic figures, of whom most people possess at least one example, if not more, round whom the past and the future have a way of assembling.
Anthony Powell
#96. In due course one learns, where individuals and emotions are concerned, that Time's slide-rule can make unlikely adjustments.
Anthony Powell
#97. There is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.
Anthony Powell
#98. The popular Press always talk as if only the rich committed adultery. One really can't imagine a more snobbish assumption.
Anthony Powell
#99. There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love.
Anthony Powell
#100. My brother is a strange fellow, said Bernard, speaking with terrible bonhomie.
Anthony Powell
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