Top 200 Anthony Powell Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

111. “Reason is given to all men, but all men do not know how to use it. Liberty is offered to each one of us, but few learn to be free. Such gifts are, in any case, a right to be earned, not a privilege for the shiftless.”

— Anthony Powell

112. “In fact the original memory of Miss Blaides returned to me one morning when I was sitting in my cream distempered, strip-lighted, bare, sanitary, glaring, forlorn little cell at the Studio. In that place it was possible to know deep despondency.”

— Anthony Powell

113. “People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel’s invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical.”

— Anthony Powell

114. “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

115. “We took a bus to Victoria, then passed on foot into a vast, desolate region of stucco streets and squares upon which a doom seemed to have fallen. The gloom was cosmic.”

— Anthony Powell

116. “Maclintick’s calculatedly humdrum appearance, although shabby, seemed aimed at concealing bohemian affiliations.”

— Anthony Powell

117. “Feeling unable to maintain this detachment of attitude towards human- and, in especial, matrimonial- affairs, I asked whether it was not true that she had married Bob Duport. She nodded; not exactly conveying, it seemed to me, that by some happy chance their union had introduced her to an unexpected terrestrial paradise.”

— Anthony Powell

118. “Albert’s shutters may have kept out the suffragettes: they did not effectively exclude the Furies.”

— Anthony Powell

119. “Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.”

— Anthony Powell

120. “Then Maclintick made that harrowing remark that established throughout all eternity his relationship with Moreland. ‘I obey you, Moreland,’ he said, ’with the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist.”

— Anthony Powell

121. “I wonder whether what we call politeness isn’t just weakness.”

— Anthony Powell

122. “Lady Warminster represented to a high degree that characteristic of her own generation that everything may be said, though nothing indecorous discussed openly. Layer upon layer of wrapping, box after box revealing in the Chinese manner yet another box, must conceal all doubtful secrets; only the discipline of infinite obliquity made it lawful to examine the seamy side of life. If these mysteries were observed everything might be contemplated: however unsavoury: however unspeakable.”

— Anthony Powell

123. “This ideal conception – that one should have an aim in life – had, indeed, only too often occurred to me as an unsolved problem; but I was still far from deciding what form my endeavours should ultimately take.”

— Anthony Powell

124. “If certain individuals fall in love from motives of convenience, they can be contrasted with plenty of others in whom passion seems principally aroused by the intensity of administrative difficulties in procuring its satisfaction.”

— Anthony Powell

125. “So aggressive was the manner in which this question was put that at first I thought the pair of them were probably drunk: a state which, in addition, the discrepancy between their respective heights for some reason quite illogically helped to suggest.”

— Anthony Powell

126. “Lady Warminster was a woman among women,’ said Mrs Erdleigh. ‘I shall never forget her gratitude when I revealed to her that Tuesday was the best day for the operation of revenge.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

129. “However, obeying that law that requires most people to minimise to a superior a misfortune which, to an inferior, they would magnify, Widmerpool thrust his head through the open window of the car, and, smiling reverentially, gave an assurance that all was well.”

— Anthony Powell

130. “Emotional crises always promote the urgent need for executive action, so that the times when we most hope to be free from the practical administration of life are always those when the need to cope with a concrete world is more than ever necessary.”

— Anthony Powell

131. “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

132. “In other words, nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common; while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

135. “Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.”

— Anthony Powell

136. “A firm belief that things were more likely than not to go wrong was another characteristic of Sir Gavin’s approach to life, induced no doubt by his own regrets. Indeed, he could not be entirely absolved from suspicion of rather enjoying the worst when it happened: at times almost of engineering disaster of a purely social kind.”

— Anthony Powell

137. “Moreland used to say love was like sea-sickness. For a time everything round you heaved about and you felt you were going to die – then you staggered down the gangway to dry land, and a minute or two later could hardly remember what you had suffered, why you had been feeling so ghastly.”

— Anthony Powell

138. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

140. “This person was standing under Lavery’s portrait of Lady Walpole-Wilson, painted at the time of her marriage, in a white dress and blue sash, a picture he was examining with the air of one trying to fill in the seconds before introductions begin to take place, rather than on account of a deep interest in art.”

— Anthony Powell

141. “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

142. “To hold a friend in the background at a certain stage of a love affair is a technique some men like to employ; a method which spreads, as it were, the emotional load, ameliorating risks of dual conflict between the lovers themselves, although at the same time posing a certain hazard in the undue proximity of a third party unencumbered with emotional responsibility – and therefore almost always seen to better advantage than the lover himself.”

— Anthony Powell

143. “So often one thinks that individuals and situations cannot be so extraordinary as they seem from outside: only to find that the truth is a thousand times odder.”

— Anthony Powell

144. “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

145. “But I was doing a bit of cleaning when you rang – the studio gets filthy – and the dust must have confused my powers of differentiation.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

147. “Emotional intensity seemed to meet and mingle with an air of indifference, even of cruelty within these ancient walls. Youth and Time here had made, as it were, some compromise.”

— Anthony Powell

148. “I wondered whether I wanted to hear more. The Jean business was long over, but even when you have ceased to love someone, that does not necessarily bring an indifference to a past shared together. Besides, though love may die, vanity lives on timelessly. I knew that I must be prepared to hear things I should not like. Yet, although where unfaithfulness reigns, ignorance may be preferable to knowledge, at the same time, once knowledge is brutally born, exactitude is preferable to uncertainty.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

150. “It’s no more normal to be a bank-manager or a bus-conductor, than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan,’ Moreland had once remarked. ‘It just happens there are more of the former types.”

— Anthony Powell