Anthony Powell Quotes & Sayings

For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity. — Anthony Powell

Silted-up residues of the years smouldered uninterruptedly - and not without melancholy - in the maroon brickwork of these medieval closes: beyond the cobbles and archways of which (in a more northerly direction) memory also brooded, no less enigmatic and inconsolable, among water-meadows and avenues of trees: the sombre demands of the past becoming at times almost suffocating in their insistence. — Anthony Powell

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

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

Stringham said: 'If you're not careful you will suffer the awful fate of the man who always knows the right clothes to wear and the right shop to buy them at. — Anthony Powell

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

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

I was aware of an unexpected drift towards intimacy, although this sudden sense of knowing her all at once much better was not simultaneously accompanied by any clear portrayal in my own mind of the kind of person she might really be. Perhaps intimacy of any sort, love or friendship, impedes all exactness of definition. — Anthony Powell

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. — Anthony Powell

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

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

Jeavon's thick dark hair, with its ridges of corkscrew curls, had now turned quite white, the Charlie Chaplin moustache remaining black. This combination of tones for some reason gave him an oddly Italian appearance, enhanced by blue overalls, obscurely suggesting a railway porter at a station in Italy. — Anthony Powell

He delayed entry for a brief period, pressing the edge of the door against his head, the other side of which touched the wall: rigid, as if imprisoned in a cruel trap specially designed to catch him and his like: some ingenious snare, savage in mechanism, though at the same time calculated to preserve from injury the skin of such rare creatures. — Anthony Powell

Sir Magnus Donners himself appeared to greet his guests at exactly the same moment. I wondered whether he had been watching at a peephole. It was like the stage entrance of a famous actor, the conscious modesty of which is designed, by its absolute ease and lack of emphasis, both to prevent the performance from being disturbed at some anti-climax of the play by too deafening a round of applause, at the same time to confirm
what everyone in the theater knows already
the complete mastery he possesses of his art. The manner in which Sir Magnus held out his hand also suggested brilliant miming of a distinguished man feeling a little uncomfortable about something. — Anthony Powell

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

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. — Anthony Powell

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. — Anthony Powell

He did his best to conceal this antipathy, because the one thing he hated, more than constituted authority itself, was to hear constituted authority questioned by anyone but himself. This is perhaps an endemic trait in all who love power, and my father had an absolute passion for power, although he was never in a position to wield it on a notable scale. — Anthony Powell

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

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

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

It is not easy - perhaps not even desirable - to judge other people by a consistent standard. Conduct obnoxious, even unbearable, in one person may be readily tolerated in another; apparently indispensable principles of behaviour are in practice relaxed - not always with impunity - in the interests of those whose nature seems to demand an exceptional measure. — Anthony Powell

I understood very clearly that something was required of me, but could not guess what I was expected to do. Some persons, knowing that they were later going to ask a favour, would have made themselves more agreeable when a favour was being asked of them. That was not Widmerpool's way. I almost admired him for making so little effort to conceal his lack of interest in my own affairs, while waiting his time to demand something of myself. — Anthony Powell

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

Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them. — Anthony Powell

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

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

She clung on to me desperately, whether as an affectionate gesture, a means of encouraging sympathy, or merely to maintain her balance, I was uncertain. The condition of excitement which she had reached to some extent communicated itself to me, for her flushed face rather improved her appearance, and she had lost all her earlier ill-humour. — Anthony Powell

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

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

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

Most individual approaches to love, however unexpected, possess a logic of their own; for only by attempting to find some rationalisation of love in the mind can its burdens easily be borne. Sentiment and power, each in their way, supply something to feed the mind, if not the heart. They are therefore elements operated often to excess by persons in temperament unable to love at all, yet at the same time unwilling to be left out of the fun, or to bear the social stigma of living emotionally uninteresting lives. — Anthony Powell

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

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

There was still distance to travel, but I was on the way to drawing level with Mr. Deacon, as a fellow grown-up, himself no longer a figment of memory from childhood, but visible proof that life had existed in much the same way before I had begun to any serious extent to take part; and would, without doubt, continue to prevail long after he and I had ceased to participate. — Anthony Powell

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 synchronised, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand. Later they dined at a restaurant quite near the flat. — Anthony Powell

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

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

Yet, even allowing for these failings, was not St John Clarke still a person more like myself than anyone else sitting round the table? That was a sobering thought. He, too, for longer years, had existed in the imagination, even though this imagination led him (in my eyes) to a world ludicrously contrived, socially misleading, professionally nauseous. On top of that, had he not on this earlier occasion gone out of his way to speak a word of carefully hedged praise for my own work? Was that, therefore, an aspect of his critical faculty for which he should be given credit, or was it an even stronger reason for guarding against the possibility of corruption at the hands of one whose own writings could not be approved? — Anthony Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

The education of the will is the end of human life. — Anthony Powell

I addressed a remark to him which he acknowledged simply by closing and opening his eyes, making me feel that, the next time I spoke, I ought to make an attempt to find something a trifle less banal to say: though his smile at the same time absolved me from the slightest blame in falling so patently short of his accustomed standards. I was not conscious of being at all offended by this demeanour: on the contrary, Truscott's comportment seemed a kind of spur to encourage all who came to win his esteem; although - and perhaps because - he was obviously prepared to offer nothing in return. — Anthony Powell

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. — Anthony Powell

You have to be a product of the product. — Anthony Powell

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

Oh, good," said Hugh, but without enthusiasm. "By the way, here is that American novel I told you about. Let me know what you think of it."
"Anything special?"
"I don't feel happy about the chapter where Irving and Wayne listen to the whip-poor-will."
"I'll study it."
I took Lot's Hometown and went back to my room to ring up Hudson. — Anthony Powell

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

Within this hollow bed of the stream the whole range of the quarry was out of sight, except for where the just visible peak of an escarpment of spoil shelved up to the horizon's mountainous coagulations of floating cottonwool, a density of white cloud perforated here and there by slowly opening and closing loopholes of the palest blue light. — Anthony Powell

While I undressed I reflected on the difficulty of believing in the existence of certain human beings, my uncle among them, even in the face of unquestionable evidence - indications sometimes even wanting in the case of persons for some reason more substantial to the mind - that each had dreams and desires like other men. — Anthony Powell

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

Although she seemed to be enjoying the party, even to the extent of being in sight of hysteria, she had evidently also reached the stage when moving to another spot had become an absolute necessity to her; not because she was in any way dissatisfied with the surroundings in which she found herself, but on account of the coercive dictation of her own nerves, not to be denied in their insistence that a change of scene must take place. — Anthony Powell

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

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

Everyone knows the manner in which some specific name will recur several times in quick succession from different quarters; part of that inexplicable magic throughout life that makes us suddenly think of someone before turning a street corner and meeting him, or her, face to face. In the same way, you may be struck, reading a book, by some obscure passage or lines of verse, quoted again, quite unexpectedly, twenty-four hours later. — Anthony Powell

Such emotions, sudden bursts of sexual jealousy that pursue us through life, sometimes without the smallest justification that memory or affection might provide, are like wounds, unknown and quiescent, that suddenly break out to give pain, or at least irritation, at a later season of the year, or in an unfamiliar climate. — Anthony Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

In those days children were rather out of fashion. — Anthony Powell

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

On most of the occasions when I visited the Ufford, halls and reception rooms were so utterly deserted that the interior might almost have been Uncle Giles's private residence. Had he been a rich bachelor, instead of a poor one, he would probably have lived in a house of just that sort: bare: anonymous: old-fashioned: draughty: with heavy mahogany cabinets and sideboards spaced out at intervals in passages and on landings; nothing that could possibly commit him to any specific opinion, beyond general disapproval of the way the world was run. — Anthony Powell

Short, square, cleanshaven, his head seemed carved out of an elephant's tusk, the whole massive cone of ivory left more or less complete in its original shape, eyes hollowed out deep in the roots, the rest of the protuberance accommodating his other features, terminating in a perfectly colossal nose that stretched directly forward from the totally bald cranium. The nose was preposterous, grotesque, slapstick, a mask from a Goldoni comedy. — Anthony Powell

Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward - in contrast with love - is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for example, come between Stringham and myself. — Anthony Powell

He was again showing recklessness in giving voice to these spasmodic outbursts of worldly knowledge. The champagne perhaps caused this intermittent pulling aside of the curtain that concealed some, apparently considerable, volume of practical information about unlikely people: a little storehouse, the existence of which he was normally unwilling to admit, yet preserved safely at the back of his mind in case of need. — Anthony Powell

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

None of this seemed to be getting us much further so far as Widmerpool was concerned. I waited for development. General Conyers did not intend to be hurried. I suspected that he might regard this narrative he was unfolding in so leisurely a manner as the last good story of his life; one that he did not propose to squander in the telling. That was reasonable enough. — Anthony Powell

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

I must have been about twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and held then many rather wild ideas on the subject of women: conceptions largely the result of having read a good deal without simultaneous opportunity to modify by personal experience the recorded judgment of others upon that matter: estimates often excellent in their conclusions if correctly interpreted, though requiring practical knowledge to be appreciated at their full value. — Anthony Powell

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

The common where we had walked the previous evening was a deserted tract of land, typical of Surrey, looking as if it might be miles from any habitation, while only a few deciduous trees divided it from country studded with bungalows. Some of the land showed traces of heath fires, charred roots and stones lying about on the blackened ground. Walking there was not at all like being in the country. Agriculture seemed as remote as in a London street. This waste land might have been some walled-in space in the suburbs where business men practised golfstrokes; or the corner of a cinema studio used for shooting wilderness scenes. It had neither memories of the past nor hope for the future. — Anthony Powell

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

I have absolutely no histrionic talent, none at all, a constitutional handicap in almost all undertakings of life;but then, after all, plenty of actors possess little enough. — Anthony Powell

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

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

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

I get a warm feeling among my books. — Anthony Powell

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

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

A dance to the music of time. — Anthony Powell

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

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

Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham. — Anthony Powell

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

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

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

However, at that stage in the walk one of those curious changes took place in circumstances of mutual intercourse that might almost be compared, scientifically speaking, with the addition in the laboratory of one chemical to another, by which the whole nature of the experiment is altered: perhaps even an explosion brought about. — Anthony Powell

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

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

The two of them might have met on that high place deliberately for public celebration of some rite or sacrifice. At first neither said a word. That seemed an age. At last Dr Trelawney took the initiative. Raising his right arm slightly, he spoke in a low clear voice, almost in the accents of one whose very perfect enunciation indicates that English is not his native tongue. — Anthony Powell

Champagne, m'lord?'
'Have we got any? One bottle would do. Even a half-bottle.'
Smith's face puckered, as if manfully attempting to force his mind to grapple with a mathematical or philosophical problem of extraordinary complexity. His bearing suggested that he had certainly before heard the word 'champagne' used, if only in some distant, outlandish context; that devotion to his master alone gave him some apprehension of what this question - these ravings, almost - might mean. Nothing good could come of it. This was a disastrous way to talk. That was his unspoken message so far as champagne was concerned. After a long pause, he at last shook his head.
'I doubt if there is any champagne left, m'lord. — Anthony Powell

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

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