Top 200 Anthony Powell Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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.”

— Anthony Powell

54. “The illusion that egoists will be pleased, or flattered, by interest taken in their habits persists throughout life; whereas, in fact, persons like Widmerpool, in complete subjection to the ego, are, by the nature of that infirmity, prevented from supposing that the minds of others could possibly be occupied by any subject far distant from the egoist’s own affairs.”

— Anthony Powell

55. “It was that prolonged, flat, cheerless week that follows Christmas. My own existence seemed infinitely stagnant, relieved only by work on another book. Those interminable latter days of the dying year create an interval, as it were, of moral suspension: one form of life already passed away before another has had time to assert some new, endemic characteristic. Imminent change of direction is for some reason often foreshadowed by such colourless patches of time.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

57. “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

58. “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

59. “The exercise of powerful ‘charm’ is, in any case, more appreciated in public than in private life, exacting, as it does, almost as heavy demands on the receiver as the transmitter, demands often too onerous to be weighed satisfactorily against the many other, all too delicate, requirements of married life.”

— Anthony Powell

60. “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

61. “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

62. “For my own part, I liked Lady Warminster, although at the same time never wholly at ease in her presence. She was immaculately free from any of the traditional blemishes of a mother-in-law; agreeable always; entertaining; even, in her own way, affectionate; but always a little alarming: an elegant, deeply experienced bird – perhaps a bird of prey – ready to sweep down and attack from the frozen mountain peaks upon which she preferred herself to live apart.”

— Anthony Powell

63. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “All right,’ said Moreland, ‘love, then. Is it better to love somebody and not have them, or have somebody and not love them? I mean from the point of view of action – living intensely. Does action consist in having or loving? In having – naturally – it might first appear. Loving is just emotion, not action at all. But is that correct? I’m not sure.”

— Anthony Powell

69. “The passages seemed catacombs of a hell assigned to the subdued regret of those who had lacked in life the income to which they felt themselves entitled; this suspicion that the two houses were an abode of the dead being increased by the fact that no one was ever to be seen about, even at the reception desk.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

73. “Perhaps not interested in the sense you mean,’ said Moreland, ‘but everyone likes being fallen in love with. People who pretend they don’t are always the ones, beyond all others, to wring the last drop of pleasure – usually sadistic pleasure – out of it.”

— Anthony Powell

74. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

76. “Later that night mutual approval took physical expression.”

— Anthony Powell

77. “The physical surroundings of most individuals, left to their own choice, vary little wherever they happen to live. No doubt that was the explanation. I was in the presence of one of those triumphs of mind over matter, like the photographer’s power of imposing his own personal visual demands on the subject photographed.”

— Anthony Powell

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “At the same time she carried herself, as ever, with complete composure, and her air of dissatisfaction may have been no more than outward expression of a fashionable indifference to life.”

— Anthony Powell

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “I knew myself incapable of writing a line of a novel – by then I had written three or four – however long released from duty. Whatever inner processes are required for writing novels, so far as I myself was concerned, war now utterly inhibited. That was one of the many disagreeable aspects of war. It was not only physically inescapable, but morally inescapable too.”

— Anthony Powell

90. “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

91. “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

92. “The crematorium was a blaze of sunshine.”

— Anthony Powell

93. “They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain.”

— Anthony Powell

94. “I know nothing of music,’ Barnby had, in turn, once remarked, ’but Hugh Moreland’s accompaniment to that film sounded to me like a lot of owls quarrelling in a bicycle factory.”

— Anthony Powell

95. “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

96. “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

97. “The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

99. “The Jew’s really the better-looking.”

— Anthony Powell

100. “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