Anthony Powell
Novelist
1905-12-21 – 2000-03-28
Anthony Powell was an English novelist best known for the twelve-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time.
Books by Anthony Powell
-
A dance to the music of time
View on Amazon -
-
Afternoon men
View on Amazon
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Quotes by Anthony Powell
-
...in those days children were rather out of fashion.
Read quote -
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 synchronised, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand. Later they dined at a restaurant quite near the flat.
Read quote -
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 demonstrate that you did it better than someone else. If it came to that, I thought how few people do anything for its own sake, from making love to practising the arts.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.
Read quote -
Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.
Read quote -
What a shabby lot of highbrows have turned out tonight, he said, when he saw us. It makes me ashamed to be one.
Read quote -
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 required for the mechanism to produce these syllables.
Read quote -
In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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 required for the mechanism to produce these syllables.
Read quote -
...in those days children were rather out of fashion.
Read quote -
In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.
Read quote