Top 200 Anthony Powell Quotes (2024 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. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

114. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

143. “You know a fact that strikes one very forcibly as one grows older is that some people are intelligent and some are stupid.”

— Anthony Powell

144. “The two of them might have met on that high place deliberately for public celebration of some rite or sacrifice. At first neither said a word. That seemed an age. At last Dr Trelawney took the initiative. Raising his right arm slightly, he spoke in a low clear voice, almost in the accents of one whose very perfect enunciation indicates that English is not his native tongue.”

— Anthony Powell

145. “After you knew him, he must have moved further to the Left – or would it be to the Right? Extremes of policy have such a tendency to merge.”

— Anthony Powell

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “It seemed to me he was well rid of Maureen, if she really was disturbing him to the extent that it appeared; but being judicious about other people’s love affairs is easy, often merely a sign one has not understood their force or complexity.”

— Anthony Powell

150. “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