274 Quotes by Anthony Powell

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

Esteem for the army – never in this country regarded, in the continental manner, as a popular expression of the national will – implies a kind of innocence.

Short, square, cleanshaven, his head seemed carved out of an elephant’s tusk, the whole massive cone of ivory left more or less complete in its original shape, eyes hollowed out deep in the roots, the rest of the protuberance accommodating his other features, terminating in a perfectly colossal nose that stretched directly forward from the totally bald cranium. The nose was preposterous, grotesque, slapstick, a mask from a Goldoni comedy.

The Jew’s really the better-looking.

To hold a friend in the background at a certain stage of a love affair is a technique some men like to employ; a method which spreads, as it were, the emotional load, ameliorating risks of dual conflict between the lovers themselves, although at the same time posing a certain hazard in the undue proximity of a third party unencumbered with emotional responsibility – and therefore almost always seen to better advantage than the lover himself.

In due course one learns, where individuals and emotions are concerned, that Time’s slide-rule can make unlikely adjustments.

Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.

I always think one ought to be grateful to an author if one has liked even a small bit of a book.

This ideal conception – that one should have an aim in life – had, indeed, only too often occurred to me as an unsolved problem; but I was still far from deciding what form my endeavours should ultimately take.