Quotes by Anthony Powell

“In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame.”

“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.”

“In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.”

“She scarcely spoke at all and might have been one of those huge dolls which, when inclined backwards, say "Ma-ma" or "Pa-pa": though impossible to imagine in any position so undignified as that req...”

“What a shabby lot of highbrows have turned out tonight," he said, when he saw us. "It makes me ashamed to be one.”

“That was a good straightforward point of view, no pretence that games were anything but an outlet for power and aggression; no stuff about their being enjoyable as such. You played a game to demons...”

“Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.”

“Daydreams of wealth or women must have given Carolo that faraway look which never left him; sad and silent, he contemplated huge bank balances and voluptuous revels.”

“Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.”

“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 v...”

“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.”

“Speaking about times relentless passage, Powells 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 i...”

“Much of his time at Oxford passed by his own account under a dark cloud of listlessness and depression. He was dismayed by the undergraduates' relentless snobbery and unremitting emphasis on money.”

“...in those days children were rather out of fashion.”

“Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.”

“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 ...”

“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 betw...”

“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 exactl...”

“Books do furnish a room.”

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