Anthony Powell > Quotes

“I get a warm feeling among my books.”
― Anthony Powell

“Books do furnish a room.”
― Anthony Powell, Dance to the Music of Time

“Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.”
― Anthony Powell

“I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.”
― Anthony Powell

“The latter's boast that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life did not predispose me in his favour.”
― Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

“There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.”
― Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

“Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.”
― Anthony Powell

“Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.”
― Anthony Powell

“For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world – legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea – scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seeminly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.”
― Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

“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, The Kindly Ones

“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, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.”
― Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

“When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“It doesn’t do to read too much,’ Widmerpool said. ‘You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.”
― Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

“Where, as again Vaughan writes, the liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies.”
― Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings

“Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“Do you think love flourishes at Stourwater?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Moreland. ‘Love means such different things to different people.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“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, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used to play it with a long vanished girlfriend. A game in which, he says,

“...at the termination of a given passage of time...the hidden gate goes down...and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."
”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.”
― Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

“Brains and hard work are of very little avail, Jenkins, unless you know the right people.”
― Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

“There is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.”
― Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly's

“His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“Silted-up residues of the years smouldered uninterruptedly—and not without melancholy—in the maroon brickwork of these medieval closes: beyond the cobbles and archways of which (in a more northerly direction) memory also brooded, no less enigmatic and inconsolable, among water-meadows and avenues of trees: the sombre demands of the past becoming at times almost suffocating in their insistence.”
― Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

“In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.”
― Anthony Powell, A Buyer's Market

“Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.”
― Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room

“He suddenly began to look wretched, much as I had seen him look as a schoolboy: lonely: awkward: unpopular: odd; no longer the self-confident businessman into which he had grown. His face now brought back the days when one used to watch him plodding off through the drizzle to undertake the long, solitary runs across the dismal fields beyond the sewage farms: runs which were to train him for teams in which he was never included.”
― Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly's

“An exceedingly well-informed report,' said the General. 'You have given yourself the trouble to go into matters thoroughly, I see. That is one of the secrets of success in life.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“I used to imagine life divided into separate compartments, consisting, for example, of such dual abstractions as pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship and enmity; and more material classifications like work and play: a profession or calling being, according to that concept—one that seemed, at least on the surface, unequivocally assumed by persons so dissimilar from one another as Widmerpool and Archie Gilbert, something entirely different from “spare time.” 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. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; so that, at last, diversity between them, if in truth existent, seems to be almost imperceptible except in a few crude and exterior ways: unthinkable, as formerly appeared, any single consummation of cause and effect. 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, A Buyer's Market