274 Quotes by Anthony Powell

In any case, I had been one of them. If her lovers were horrifying, I too had been of their order. That had to be admitted. ‘It is no good pontificating,’ Mr Deacon used to say, ’about other people’s sexual tastes.

In books, you love somebody and want them, win them or lose them. In real life, so often, you love them and don’t want them, or want them and don’t love them.

I was somewhat put out to find that recurrent projections in the mind of the images of either of them, Jean or Suzette, did not in the least exclude that of the other. That was when I began to suspect that being in love might be a complicated affair.

As a child you are in some ways more acutely aware of what people feel about one another than you are when childhood has come to an end.

Perhaps these are inward irritations always produced by love: the acutely sensitive nerves of intimacy: the haunting fear that all may not go well.

I had no idea you had musical tastes, Nick. Why did you keep them from me all these years? Because I never asked, I suppose. One always finds the answer to everything in one’s own egotism.

I indicated that I wrote for the papers, not mentioning books because, if not specifically in your line, authorship is an embarrassing subject for all concerned. Besides, it never sounds like a serious occupation.

I wondered whether I wanted to hear more. The Jean business was long over, but 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.

He was saddled with the equally serious military – indeed, also civilian – handicap of chronic inability to be obsequious to superiors in rank, particularly when he found them uncongenial.