Top 200 Anthony Powell Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

155. “Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.”

— Anthony Powell

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Anthony Powell

165. “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

166. “I passed through empty streets, thinking that I, too, should be married soon, a change that presented itself in terms of action rather than reflection, the mood in which even the most prudent often marry: a crisis of delight and anxiety, excitement and oppression.”

— Anthony Powell

167. “This matter of being able to establish Barbara’s whereabouts for a specific number of hours brought at least limited relief from agonies of ignorance as to what her movements might be, with consequent inability to exercise control over her in however slight a degree; for love of that sort – the sort where the sensual element has been reduced to a minimum – must after all, largely if not entirely, resolve itself to the exercise of power: a fact of which Barbara was, of course, more aware than I.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

169. “Because nothing establishes the timelessness of Time like those episodes of early experience seen, on re-examination at a later period, to have been crowded together with such unbelievable closeness in the course of a few years; yet equally giving the illusion of being so infinitely extended during the months when actually taking place.”

— Anthony Powell

170. “I indicated that I wrote for the papers, not mentioning books because, if not specifically in your line, authorship is an embarrassing subject for all concerned. Besides, it never sounds like a serious occupation.”

— Anthony Powell

171. “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

172. “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

173. “He started with interests of a genuinely scientific and humane kind – full of idealism, you know – then gradually involved himself with all sorts of mystical nonsense, transcendental magic, goodness knows what rubbish. Made quite a good thing out of it, I believe. Contributions from the Faithful, women especially. Human beings are sad dupes, I fear. The priesthood would have a thin time of it were that not so.”

— Anthony Powell

174. “The message of the bell, the singer’s tragic tone announcing it, underlined life’s inflexible call to order, reaffirming the illusory nature of love and pleasure.”

— Anthony Powell

175. “In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame.”

— Anthony Powell

176. “Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.”

— Anthony Powell

177. “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

178. “One always finds the answer to everything in one’s own egotism.”

— Anthony Powell

179. “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

180. “I was relieved to find her attitude to myself suggested nothing more hostile than complete indifference.”

— Anthony Powell

181. “He was saddled with the equally serious military – indeed, also civilian – handicap of chronic inability to be obsequious to superiors in rank, particularly when he found them uncongenial.”

— Anthony Powell

182. “Once in a way, for a brief instant of time, the subconscious fantasies of the mind seem to overflow, so that we make, in our waking moments, assumptions as outrageous and incredible as those thoughts and acts which provide the commonplace of dreams.”

— Anthony Powell

183. “At first Widmerpool and I were unable to grasp the root of the trouble, partly because Monsieur Lundquist’s lobbing technique was sufficiently common for none of the rest of us specially to have noticed it that afternoon: partly because at that age I was not yet old enough to be aware of the immense rage that can be secreted in the human heart by cumulative minor irritation.”

— Anthony Powell

184. “I always think one ought to be grateful to an author if one has liked even a small bit of a book.”

— Anthony Powell

185. “Like everything that’s any good, it has about twenty different meanings.”

— Anthony Powell

186. “Verbal description of everything, however, must remain infinitely distant from the thing itself, overstatement and understatement sometimes hitting off the truth better than a flat assertion of bare fact.”

— Anthony Powell

187. “Mrs Maclintick’s dissatisfaction with life had probably reached so advanced a stage that she was unable to approach any new event amiably, even when proffered temporary alleviation of her own chronic spleen.”

— Anthony Powell

188. “Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.”

— Anthony Powell

189. “The education of the will is the end of human life.”

— Anthony Powell

190. “The popular Press always talk as if only the rich committed adultery. One really can’t imagine a more snobbish assumption.”

— Anthony Powell

191. “Although incomplete, the story of Templer’s London adventure – to be recapitulated on countless future occasions – had sufficiently amplified the incident for its significance to be inescapably clear to Stringham and myself. This was a glimpse through that mysterious door, once shut, that now seemed to stand ajar. It was as if sounds of far-off conflict, or the muffled din of music and shouting, dimly heard in the past, had now come closer than ever before.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

193. “His physical attitude suggested a holy man doing penance vicariously for the sin of those in his spiritual care.”

— Anthony Powell

194. “That was a good straightforward point of view, no pretence that games were anything but an outlet for power and aggression; no stuff about their being enjoyable as such. You played a game to demonstrate that you did it better than someone else. If it came to that, I thought how few people do anything for its own sake, from making love to practising the arts.”

— Anthony Powell

195. “A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise. That happens at different moments in different careers.”

— Anthony Powell

196. “He delayed entry for a brief period, pressing the edge of the door against his head, the other side of which touched the wall: rigid, as if imprisoned in a cruel trap specially designed to catch him and his like: some ingenious snare, savage in mechanism, though at the same time calculated to preserve from injury the skin of such rare creatures.”

— Anthony Powell

197. “It is, indeed, strange how often persons, living in other respects quite unobjectively, can suddenly become acutely objective about some specific concern of their own.”

— Anthony Powell

198. “Daydreams of wealth or women must have given Carolo that faraway look which never left him; sad and silent, he contemplated huge bank balances and voluptuous revels.”

— Anthony Powell

199. “There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.”

— Anthony Powell

200. “In leaving behind the kind of shell common to all undergraduates, indeed to most young men, they had, in one sense, taken more definite shape by each establishing conspicuously his own individual identity, thereby automatically drawing farther apart from each other.”

— Anthony Powell