Top 200 Anthony Powell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Widmerpool still represented to my mind a kind of embodiment of thankless labour and unsatisfied ambition.”

— Anthony Powell

102. “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

103. “Wisdom is the power to admit that you cannot understand and judge the people in their entirety.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

117. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

119. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

121. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

123. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

133. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

135. “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

136. “His daughters had lived their early life in permanent disgrace for having, none of them, been born a boy.”

— Anthony Powell

137. “In fact, so far as ‘love’ was concerned, I had been living for some years past in a rather makeshift manner. This was not because I felt the matter to be of little interest, like a man who hardly cares what he eats provided hunger is satisfied, or one prepared to discuss painting, should the subject arise, though never tempted to enter a picture gallery. On the contrary, my interest in love was keen enough, but the thing itself seemed not particularly simple to come by.”

— Anthony Powell

138. “In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.”

— Anthony Powell

139. “To those familiar with the rhythm of living there are few surprises in this world.”

— Anthony Powell

140. “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

141. “That illusion – as such a point of view was, in due course, to appear – was closely related to another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments.”

— Anthony Powell

142. “In books, you love somebody and want them, win them or lose them. In real life, so often, you love them and don’t want them, or want them and don’t love them.”

— Anthony Powell

143. “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

144. “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

145. “In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

147. “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

148. “I was thinking the other day that hypochondria’s a stepbrother to masochism,′ said Hugo.”

— Anthony Powell

149. “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

150. “I forgot at the time that this inability to penetrate a room is a particular form of hesitation to be associated with persons in whom an extreme egoism is dominant: the acceptance of someone else’s place or dwelling possibly implying some distasteful abnegation of the newcomer’s rights or position.”

— Anthony Powell