Top 200 Anthony Powell Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Anthony Powell

2. “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

3. “A dance to the music of time.”

— Anthony Powell

4. “Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.”

— Anthony Powell

5. “There seemed no particular object in avoiding banality from the start, as the evening showed every sign of developing into a banal one.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

7. “I get a warm feeling among my books.”

— Anthony Powell

8. “Self-love seems so often unrequited.”

— Anthony Powell

9. “Books do furnish a room.”

— Anthony Powell

10. “The meal passed off, therefore, with more success than might have been expected from such oddly assorted company. I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some ‘ordinary’ world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.”

— Anthony Powell

11. “You have to be a product of the product.”

— Anthony Powell

12. “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

13. “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.”

— Anthony Powell

14. “The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.”

— Anthony Powell

15. “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

16. “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

17. “In the end most things in life – perhaps all things – turn out to be appropriate.”

— Anthony Powell

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Life becomes more and more like an examination where you have to guess the questions as well as the answers. I’d long decided there were no answers. I’m beginning to suspect there aren’t really any questions either, none at least of any consequence, even the old perennial, whether or not to stay alive.”

— Anthony Powell

21. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Like most people in rebellion, he was more than half in love with what he was rebelling against.”

— Anthony Powell

30. “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

31. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

34. “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

35. “I listened to what was being said without feeling – as I came to feel later – that I was, in one sense, part and parcel of the same community; that when people gossiped about matters like Carolo and his girl, one was listening to a morsel, if only an infinitesimal morsel, of one’s own life.”

— Anthony Powell

36. “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

37. “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

38. “The clocks were striking midnight at different places all over the town as I stepped through the door of my college. The rain had cleared. Moonlight gave the grass and towers an air of unreality, as if all would be removed in the morning to make way for another scene.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

40. “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.”

— Anthony Powell

41. “In its vulgar way, a painstaking piece of work, although one must always remember – something often forgotten today – that because things are generally known, they are not necessarily the better for being written down, or publicly announced. Some are, some aren’t. As in everything else, good sense, taste, art, all have their place. Saying you prefer to disregard art, taste, good sense, does not mean that those elements do not exist – it merely means you lack them yourself.”

— Anthony Powell

42. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

44. “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

45. “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

46. “Marriage appeared something remote and forbidding, with which desire for Barbara had little or no connexion. She seemed to exist merely to disturb my rest: to be possessed neither by lawful nor unlawful means: made of dreams, yet to be captured only by reality.”

— Anthony Powell

47. “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

48. “I had no idea you had musical tastes, Nick. Why did you keep them from me all these years? Because I never asked, I suppose. One always finds the answer to everything in one’s own egotism.”

— Anthony Powell

49. “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

50. “I found later that she was indeed what is called ‘a tease’, perhaps the only outward indication that her inner life was not altogether happy; since there is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.”

— Anthony Powell