274 Quotes by Anthony Powell

Jeavon’s thick dark hair, with its ridges of corkscrew curls, had now turned quite white, the Charlie Chaplin moustache remaining black. This combination of tones for some reason gave him an oddly Italian appearance, enhanced by blue overalls, obscurely suggesting a railway porter at a station in Italy.

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

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

In the end most things in life – perhaps all things – turn out to be appropriate.

But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned – or everything is – because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.

I was thinking the other day that hypochondria’s a stepbrother to masochism,′ said Hugo.

You know a fact that strikes one very forcibly as one grows older is that some people are intelligent and some are stupid.

One always imagines things happen in hot blood,’ he said. ‘An ill-considered remark starts a row. Hard words follow, misunderstandings. Matters that can be put right in the end. Unfortunately life doesn’t work out like that. First of all there is no row, secondly, nothing can be put right.

However, at that stage in the walk one of those curious changes took place in circumstances of mutual intercourse that might almost be compared, scientifically speaking, with the addition in the laboratory of one chemical to another, by which the whole nature of the experiment is altered: perhaps even an explosion brought about.