Quotes by Anthony Powell

There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other.

Bring a torch, if youve got one. Its as dark as hell and stinks of something far worse than cheese.

Some of the best of us are quite unambitious.

It was [Hughs] omnipresent fear that some woman might be foisted on him who would turn out to be an adventuress and would blackmail him. This preoccupation made it almost impossible for him to engage a secretary.

He [Widmerpool] moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.

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.

For some reason Canon Fenneau made me feel a little uneasy. His voice might be soft, it was also coercive. He had small eyes, a large loose mouth, the lips thick, a somewhat receding chin. The eyes were the main feature. They were unusual eyes, not only almost unnaturally small, but vague, moist, dreamy, the eyes of a medium. His cherubic side, increased by a long slightly uptilted nose, was a little too good to be true, with eyes like that. In the manner in which he gave you all his attention there was a taste for mastery.

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.

One’s capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age.

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

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;

The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.

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.

Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against ones 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.

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.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed.

Self-love seems so often unrequited.

One hears about life all the time from different people with very different narrative gifts.

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

“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.”