Top 100 Anthony Powell Quotes
#1. On reading the first part of Anthony Powell's four-part masterpiece, 'A Dance to the Music of Time,' I was struck by one of the characters - an irritating peripheral character- who keeps showing up in the main protagonist's life.
Rebecca Pidgeon
#2. I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.
Ian Rankin
#3. For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.
Alan Furst
#4. Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists.
Tariq Ali
#5. Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.
Alan Furst
#6. I wonder whether what we call politeness isn't just weakness
Anthony Powell
#7. Brains and hard work are of very little avail, Jenkins, unless you know the right people.
Anthony Powell
#8. Widmerpool still represented to my mind a kind of embodiment of thankless labour and unsatisfied ambition.
Anthony Powell
#9. 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
#10. Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold.
Anthony Powell
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Widmerpool's face assumed a dramatic expression that made him look rather like a large fish moving swiftly through opaque water to devour a smaller one.
Anthony Powell
#24. Some persons feel drawn towards those who dislike them, or are at least determined to overcome opposition of that sort.
Anthony Powell
#25. The education of the will is the end of human life.
Anthony Powell
#27. Certain actions take place outside the normal course of things so unexpectedly that they seem to paralyse ordinary capacity for feeling surprise;
Anthony Powell
#28. 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
#29. As a child you are in some ways more acutely aware of what people feel about one another than you are when childhood has come to an end.
Anthony Powell
#30. 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
#31. Only an atmosphere of quiet hard work and dull, serious conversation were appropriate to him.
Anthony Powell
#32. People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.
Anthony Powell
#33. Emotional intensity seemed to meet and mingle with an air of indifference, even of cruelty within these ancient walls. Youth and Time here had made, as it were, some compromise.
Anthony Powell
#34. 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
#35. Both she and Umfraville might be said to represent forms of revolt, and nothing dates people more than the standards from which they have chosen to react.
Anthony Powell
#36. 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
#37. Outside, the detonation of loudly-slammed taxi doors, suggesting the opening of a cannonade, had died down.
Anthony Powell
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Wit, shrewdness about other aspects of life, grasp of the arts, fundamental good nature, none seemed any help in solving his emotional problems; to some extent these qualities, as displayed by him, were even a hindrance.
Anthony Powell
#41. Wisdom is the power to admit that you cannot understand and judge the people in their entirety.
Anthony Powell
#42. Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.
Anthony Powell
#44. Anyway, what can one do here? I am seriously thinking of running away and joining the Foreign Legion or the North-West Mounted Police - whichever work the shorter hours.
Anthony Powell
#45. Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.
Anthony Powell
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. It was, however, in keeping with the way my uncle conducted his life that he should reach his destination without knowing the name of the goal.
Anthony Powell
#49. 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
#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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. I don't dislike him because he's a Jew,' said Mr. Nunnery. 'One can't dismiss whole races at a time.' 'He's all right.' 'You'd hardly know he was a Jew.' 'Oh, no. Hardly at all.
Anthony Powell
#56. His own family regarded Robert as one of those quietly self-indulgent people who live rather secret lives because they find themselves thereby less burdened by having to think of others.
Anthony Powell
#57. She [Lady Budd] was dressed in a manner to be described as impregnable, like a long, neat, up-to-date battle-cruiser.
Anthony Powell
#58. But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned - or everything is - because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.
Anthony Powell
#59. There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
Anthony Powell
#60. It is, indeed, strange how often persons, living in other respects quite unobjectively, can suddenly become acutely objective about some specific concern of their own.
Anthony Powell
#61. His daughters had lived their early life in permanent disgrace for having, none of them, been born a boy.
Anthony Powell
#62. Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.
Anthony Powell
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. I was relieved to find her attitude to myself suggested nothing more hostile than complete indifference.
Anthony Powell
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. She glided away towards the lift, which seemed hardly needed, with its earthly and mechanical paraphernalia, to bear her up to the higher levels.
Anthony Powell
#71. 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
#72. It is, after all, envy rather than jealousy that causes most of the trouble in married life.
Anthony Powell
#73. Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.
Anthony Powell
#74. God is able to make all grace abound toward you that you alway having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work
Anthony B. Powell
#75. 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
#76. 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
#78. 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
#79. He [Widmerpool] moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.
Anthony Powell
#80. 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
#81. Pictures, apart from their aesthetic interest, can achieve the mysterious fascination of those enigmatic scrawls on walls, the expression of Heaven knows what psychological urge on the part of the executant;
Anthony Powell
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Where, as again Vaughan writes, the liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies.
Anthony Powell
#85. Mrs Maclintick's dissatisfaction with life had probably reached so advanced a stage that she was unable to approach any new event amiably, even when proffered temporary alleviation of her own chronic spleen.
Anthony Powell
#86. 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
#87. The latter's boast that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life did not predispose me in his favour.
Anthony Powell
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. The war seems to have altered some people out of recognition and made others more than ever like themselves,' said Isobel.
Anthony Powell
#91. Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.
Anthony Powell
#92. Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
Anthony Powell
#93. I want an immediate explanation of the infernal muddle your incompetence has made.
Anthony Powell
#94. 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
#95. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
Anthony Powell
#97. Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.
Anthony Powell
#98. There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other.
Anthony Powell
#99. In those days children were rather out of fashion.
Anthony Powell
#100. Maclintick's calculatedly humdrum appearance, although shabby, seemed aimed at concealing bohemian affiliations.
Anthony Powell
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
