Anthony Powell quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Anthony Powell

Anthony Powell Famous Quotes & Sayings

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It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

A dance to the music of time.

Wisdom is the power to admit that you cannot understand and judge the people in their entirety.

The popular Press always talk as if only the rich committed adultery. One really can't imagine a more snobbish assumption.

Writing is above all a question of instinct.

Perhaps these are inward irritations always produced by love: the acutely sensitive nerves of intimacy: the haunting fear that all may not go well.

Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.

Like many persons more interested in power than sensual enjoyment, Sillery touched no strong drink.

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

What a shabby lot of highbrows have turned out tonight," he said, when he saw us. "It makes me ashamed to be one.

Brains and hard work are of very little avail, Jenkins, unless you know the right people.

It is, after all, envy rather than jealousy that causes most of the trouble in married life.

The war seems to have altered some people out of recognition and made others more than ever like themselves,' said Isobel.

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

There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love.

I get a warm feeling among my books.

There is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.

In due course one learns, where individuals and emotions are concerned, that Time's slide-rule can make unlikely adjustments.

Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.

Widmerpool still represented to my mind a kind of embodiment of thankless labour and unsatisfied ambition.

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

She glided away towards the lift, which seemed hardly needed, with its earthly and mechanical paraphernalia, to bear her up to the higher levels.

His physical attitude suggested a holy man doing penance vicariously for the sin of those in his spiritual care.

The education of the will is the end of human life.

Where, as again Vaughan writes, the liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies.

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.

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

Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.

In those days children were rather out of fashion.

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

Books do furnish a room.

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.

She [Lady Budd] was dressed in a manner to be described as impregnable, like a long, neat, up-to-date battle-cruiser.

I want an immediate explanation of the infernal muddle your incompetence has made.

I wonder whether what we call politeness isn't just weakness

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

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

My brother is a strange fellow, said Bernard, speaking with terrible bonhomie.

But he also looked as if by then he knew what worry was, something certainly unknown to him in the past.

suggestion of public service, even

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.

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.

I always think one ought to be grateful to an author if one has liked even a small bit of a book.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Outside, the detonation of loudly-slammed taxi doors, suggesting the opening of a cannonade, had died down.

The army is at once the worst place for egoists, and the best.

Some persons feel drawn towards those who dislike them, or are at least determined to overcome opposition of that sort.

The latter's boast that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life did not predispose me in his favour.

His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.

In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.

I was far from understanding that the capacity of men interested in power is not necessarily expressed in the brilliance of their conversation.

There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other.

His daughters had lived their early life in permanent disgrace for having, none of them, been born a boy.

Their behaviour exemplified two different sides of life, in spite of some outward similarity in their tastes.

You have to be a product of the product.

Romantic ideas about the way life is lived are often to be found in persons themselves fairly coarse-grained.

The Jew's really the better-looking.

Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.

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

Certain actions take place outside the normal course of things so unexpectedly that they seem to paralyse ordinary capacity for feeling surprise;

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.

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.