Quotes from Anthony Powell

In an inexplicable way he was quite different from anyone else....He was smallish, neat, solidly built....Possibly he was a man who at once became self-conscious before a camera. Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness he did not possess at all. [On. F. Scott Fitzgerald]

Not all the fruits of Victory are appetising to the palate,' said Pennistone. 'An issue of gall and wormwood has been laid on.

In one room the carpet had been rolled back, and a hunchback wearing a velvet smoking-jacket was playing an accordion, writhing backwards and forwards as he attacked his instrument with demiurgic frenzy.

I had not expected him to be in the least senile, but the sharpness of his manner may have been amplified by some apprehension, shared by myself, that changes must have taken place in both of us during the last twenty years, which could prove mutually disenchanting.

Atwater gave the boy twopence and began to bite the apple. It was green and tasted of absolutely nothing. It was like eating material in the abstract.

Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail.

A residuum of the experience was inevitable.

BEING in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests. In

At that stage of life all sorts of things were going on round about that only later took on any meaning or pattern.

He was a weedy-looking young man with straw-coloured hair and rather long legs, who had failed twice for the Foreign Office. He sometimes wore tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles to correct a slight squint, and through influence he had recently got a job in a museum. His father was a retired civil servant who lived in Essex, where he and his wife kept a chicken farm.

Her expression was oafish, but it was on the whole this quality that gave her face a certain retentive efficacy. She had the look of a gnome or prematurely vicious child. But underneath the suggestion of peculiar knowingness an apparent and immense credulity lurked.

Some of the best of us are quite unambitious.

The barman came to the other side of the counter.    Time please, he said.    Harriet said: You mustn't hurry a lady drinking a pint of beer. The effects might be fatal.

He stood pondering this flat, forthright declaration of anti-simianism on Miss Weedon's part. The notion that some people might not like monkeys was evidently entirely new to him; surprising, perhaps a trifle displeasing, but at the same time one of those general ideas of which one can easily grasp the general import without being necessarily in agreement. It was a theory that startled by its stark simplicity.

Weddings are notoriously depressing affairs.

In place of those sounds some cats were quarrelling, or making love, in the gardens running the length of the square. I

I always enjoy this title—Cambises, King of Percia: a Lamentable Tragedy mixed full of Pleasant Mirth.' 'What's it like?' 'Not particularly exciting, but does summarize life.

That morning was the last time I saw Moreland. It was also the last time I had, with anyone, the sort of talk we used to have together. Things drawing to a close, even quite suddenly, was hardly a surprise.

A liability suddenly presented itself, bringing such musings sharply to a close, demanding rapid decisions.

Contemplation of this banal maxim increased the depression that had suddenly descended on me.

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.

Indeed, the illusion that anyone can escape from the marks of his vocation is an aspect of romanticism common to every profession; those occupied with the world of action claiming their true interests to lie in the pleasure of imagination or reflection, while persons principally concerned with reflective or imaginative pursuits are for ever asserting their inalienable right to participation in an active sphere.

This is something of a paradox in that the transgression—crime perhaps—of America has been to reject Classicism for Romanticism. The national distaste for moderation—to which Henry Adams referred—inevitably leads to such a choice.

We were now in the midst of dangerous abstractions which might once more threaten further embarrassments of the kind I hoped to avoid.