Best 68 quotes of Anthony Powell on MyQuotes

Books do furnish a room.

Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.

He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Selflove seems so often unrequited.

He gave me a look of great contempt; as I supposed, for venturing, even by implication, to draw a parallel between a lack of affluence that might, literally, affect my purchase of rare vintages, and a figure of speech intended delicately to convey his own dire want for the bare necessities of life. He remained silent for several seconds, as if trying to make up his mind whether he could ever bring himself to speak to me again; and then said gruffly: 'I've got to go now.'

I get a warm feeling among my books.

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

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.

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.

On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough.

Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil the promise of their early years.

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.

Self-love seems so often unrequited.

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

[T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.

The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

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.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

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.

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.

Bring a torch, if you've got one. It's as dark as hell and stinks of something far worse than cheese.

Cortney at times seemed unnerved by Da Costa's general appearance and manner, but most of all by his clothes, which, as always, looked as if they had been made by a good tailor for someone of quite different shape.

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.

Feeling unable to maintain this detachment of attitude towards human- and, in especial, matrimonial- affairs, I asked whether it was not true that she had married Bob Duport. She nodded; not exactly conveying, it seemed to me, that by some happy chance their union had introduced her to an unexpected terrestrial paradise.

For some reason Canon Fenneau made me feel a little uneasy. His voice might be soft, it was also coercive. He had small eyes, a large loose mouth, the lips thick, a somewhat receding chin. The eyes were the main feature. They were unusual eyes, not only almost unnaturally small, but vague, moist, dreamy, the eyes of a medium. His cherubic side, increased by a long slightly uptilted nose, was a little too good to be true, with eyes like that. In the manner in which he gave you all his attention there was a taste for mastery.

He continually thought of Lucy. But he did not think anything definite about her. He merely thought of her.

Her expression was oafish, but it was on the whole this quality that gave her face a certain retentive efficacy. She had the look of a gnome or prematurely vicious child. But underneath the suggestion of peculiar knowingness an apparent and immense credulity lurked.

He saw that as usual it would be better to be careful as for some years now he had found being good to be almost out of the question.

He suddenly began to look wretched, much as I had seen him look as a schoolboy: lonely: awkward: unpopular: odd; no longer the self-confident businessman into which he had grown. His face now brought back the days when one used to watch him plodding off through the drizzle to undertake the long, solitary runs across the dismal fields beyond the sewage farms: runs which were to train him for teams in which he was never included.

He [Widmerpool] moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.

His woolly grey hair, short thick body, air of perpetual busyness, suggested an industrious gnome conscripted into the service of the army; a gnome who also liked to practise considerable malice against the race of men with whom he mingled, by making as complicated as possible every transaction they had to execute through himself.

However much one hears about individuals, the picture formed in the mind rarely approximates to the reality. So it was with Mrs Maclintick. I was not prepared for her in the flesh. When she opened the door to us, her formidable discontent with life swept across the threshold in scorching, blasting waves.

In an inexplicable way he was quite different from anyone else....He was smallish, neat, solidly built....Possibly he was a man who at once became self-conscious before a camera. Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness he did not possess at all. [On. F. Scott Fitzgerald]

In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.

In fact, she [Pamela Flitton] seemed to prefer 'older men' on the whole, possibly because of their potentiality for deeper suffering. Young men might superficially transcend their seniors in this respect, but they probably showed less endurance in sustaining that state, while, once pinioned, the middle-aged could be made to writhe almost indefinitely.

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.

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.

...in those days children were rather out of fashion.

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.

I was relieved to find her attitude to myself suggested nothing more hostile than complete indifference.

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

Maclintick's calculatedly humdrum appearance, although shabby, seemed aimed at concealing bohemian affiliations.

Major Fosdick was cleaning his guns in the drawing-room because it was the most comfortable room in the house. While he did this he brooded. He enjoyed cleaning his guns and he enjoyed brooding so that the afternoon was passing pleasantly enough and its charm was disturbed only by the presence of his wife, who sat opposite him, mending a flannel undergarment and making disjointed conversation about subjects in which he was not interested.

Mr. Deacon, on the other hand, was in favour of abolishing, or ignoring, the existing world entirely, with a view to experimenting with one of an entirely different order. He was a student of Esperanto (or, possibly, one of the lesser-known artificial languages), intermittently vegetarian, and an advocate of decimal coinage.

Mrs. Dadds, who was telling a story about her chilblains, brought her narrative to a more or less satisfactory conclusion and paused to regain her breath.

One’s capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age.

Only an atmosphere of quiet hard work and dull, serious conversation were appropriate to him.

Senile decay seemed already to have laid its hand on him while he was still in the grip of arrested development.