Top 200 Anthony Powell Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Writing is above all a question of instinct.”

— Anthony Powell

52. “He spoke as if procreation of children were an extraordinary fate to overtake anyone, consequence of imprudence, if not worse.”

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

— Anthony Powell

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

66. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

69. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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.”

— Anthony Powell

98. “Women can be immensely obtuse about all kinds of things,’ Barnby was fond of saying, ’but where the emotions are concerned their opinion is always worthy of consideration.”

— Anthony Powell

99. “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

100. “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