Quotes by Anthony Powell

“When you give someone a book, you don’t give him just paper, ink, and glue. You give him the possibility of a whole new life.”

“In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

“There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.”

“I keep to old books, for they teach me something; from the new I learn very little.”

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

“The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.”

“Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They dont fulfill the promise of their early years.”

“He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Self-love seems so often unrequited.”

“Self-love seems so often unrequited.”

“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 synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.”

“People think that because a novels invented, it isnt true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.”

“An immediate, overpowering, almost mystic sense of relief took shape within me. I felt suddenly sure everything was going to be all right. This was something quite apart from even the most cursory reflection upon strategic implications involved.”

“[His wife shuddered thinking of the terrifying tide of corpses floating in the flood.] I couldnt go back to that, ... Some of them could be my family.”

“We will never forget what he did for us.”

“Its more about faith and how God speaks to you and how it happens. I dont think Ive worked on a play with such an even keel.”

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.

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.

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.

Books do furnish a room.

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.