274 Quotes by Anthony Powell

I wonder whether what we call politeness isn’t just weakness.

Verbal description of everything, however, must remain infinitely distant from the thing itself, overstatement and understatement sometimes hitting off the truth better than a flat assertion of bare fact.

It’s no more normal to be a bank-manager or a bus-conductor, than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan,’ Moreland had once remarked. ‘It just happens there are more of the former types.

It was an occasion that undoubtedly did more credit to Mr. Deacon’s social adroitness than to my own, because I was still young enough to be only dimly aware that there are moments when mutual acquaintance may be allowed more wisely to pass unrecognised.

I felt that, if we could avoid seeing each other for long enough, any questions of sentiment – so often deprecated by Barbara herself – could be allowed quietly to subside, and take their place in those niches of memory especially reserved for abortive emotional entanglements of that particular kind.

People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel’s invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical.

Lady Warminster represented to a high degree that characteristic of her own generation that everything may be said, though nothing indecorous discussed openly. Layer upon layer of wrapping, box after box revealing in the Chinese manner yet another box, must conceal all doubtful secrets; only the discipline of infinite obliquity made it lawful to examine the seamy side of life. If these mysteries were observed everything might be contemplated: however unsavoury: however unspeakable.

It was, however, in keeping with the way my uncle conducted his life that he should reach his destination without knowing the name of the goal.

He seemed about to speak; then, as if he could not give sufficient weight to the words while we walked, he stopped and faced me.