Quotes from Anthony Powell

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.

Why are you so stuck up?' she asked, truculently. 'I'm just made that way.' 'You ought to fight it.' 'I can't see why.

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.

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

One always finds the answer to everything in one's own egotism.

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

The Jew's really the better-looking.

Has any writer ever told the truth about women?' he had asked. . . . 'Possibly. Nor about men either, if it comes to that.

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

The education of the will is the end of human life.

People can only be themselves,' she said. 'If they possessed the qualities you desire in them, they would be different people.' 'That is what I should like them to be.

Even when you have ceased to love someone, that does not necessarily bring an indifference to a past shared together. Besides, though love may die, vanity lives on timelessly. I knew that I must be prepared to hear things I should not like. Yet, although where unfaithfulness reigns, ignorance may be preferable to knowledge, at the same time, once knowledge is brutally born, exactitude is preferable to uncertainty.

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.

Bring a torch, if you've got one. It's as dark as hell and stinks of something far worse than cheese.

I found later that she was indeed what is called 'a tease', perhaps the only outward indication that her inner life was not altogether happy; since there is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.

Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep;

He was again showing recklessness in giving voice to these spasmodic outbursts of worldly knowledge. The champagne perhaps caused this intermittent pulling aside of the curtain that concealed some, apparently considerable, volume of practical information about unlikely people: a little storehouse, the existence of which he was normally unwilling to admit, yet preserved safely at the back of his mind in case of need.

Maclintick's calculatedly humdrum appearance, although shabby, seemed aimed at concealing bohemian affiliations.

Since the baby had died, they had had no other child.

The crematorium was a blaze of sunshine.

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

I listened to what was being said without feeling – as I came to feel later – that I was, in one sense, part and parcel of the same community; that when people gossiped about matters like Carolo and his girl, one was listening to a morsel, if only an infinitesimal morsel, of one's own life.

Of this crisis in my life, I remember chiefly a sense of tremendous inevitability, a feeling that fate was settling its own problems, and too much reflection would be out of place.

I'm not a religious chap. I don't know anything about that sort of thing. But there must be something beyond all this sex business.' 'Yes.' 'You think so?' 'Oh yes. Quite likely. Why not?' 'But what?' 'I can't help.' 'You can't.