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

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

— Anthony Powell

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

109. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

129. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

131. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

138. “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

139. “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

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. “She clung on to me desperately, whether as an affectionate gesture, a means of encouraging sympathy, or merely to maintain her balance, I was uncertain. The condition of excitement which she had reached to some extent communicated itself to me, for her flushed face rather improved her appearance, and she had lost all her earlier ill-humour.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

144. “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

145. “For a brief second, for an inexpressibly curtailed efflux of time, so short that its duration could be appreciated only in recollection, being immediately engulfed at the moment of birth, I was conscious of a sensation I had never before encountered: an awareness that Stringham was perhaps a trifle embarrassed.”

— Anthony Powell

146. “It was an occasion that undoubtedly did more credit to Mr. Deacon’s social adroitness than to my own, because I was still young enough to be only dimly aware that there are moments when mutual acquaintance may be allowed more wisely to pass unrecognised.”

— 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. “Maclintick did not answer. He removed the cork from a bottle, the slight ‘pop’ of its emergence appearing to em-body the material of a reply to his wife, at least all the reply he intended to give.”

— Anthony Powell

149. “However much one hears about individuals, the picture formed in the mind rarely approximates to the reality. So it was with Mrs Maclintick. I was not prepared for her in the flesh. When she opened the door to us, her formidable discontent with life swept across the threshold in scorching, blasting waves.”

— Anthony Powell

150. “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