Quotes from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“Well,' said Mrs. Erdleigh, speaking kindly, as if to a child who has proposed a game inevitably associated with the breakage of china, 'I know trouble will come of it if we do.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“We took a bus to Victoria, then passed on foot into a vast, desolate region of stucco streets and squares upon which a doom seemed to have fallen. The gloom was cosmic.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“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.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“In fact the original memory of Miss Blaides returned to me one morning when I was sitting in my cream distempered, strip-lighted, bare, sanitary, glaring, forlorn little cell at the Studio. In that place it was possible to know deep despondency.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“Only an atmosphere of quiet hard work and dull, serious conversation were appropriate to him.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“She [Lady Budd] was dressed in a manner to be described as impregnable, like a long, neat, up-to-date battle-cruiser.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“When Quiggin ingratiated himself with people—during his days as secretary to St. John Clarke, for example—he was far too shrewd to confine himself to mere flattery. A modicum of bullying was a pleasure both to himself and his patrons.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“Champagne, m'lord?'
'Have we got any? One bottle would do. Even a half-bottle.'
Smith's face puckered, as if manfully attempting to force his mind to grapple with a mathematical or philosophical problem of extraordinary complexity. His bearing suggested that he had certainly before heard the word 'champagne' used, if only in some distant, outlandish context; that devotion to his master alone gave him some apprehension of what this question—these ravings, almost—might mean. Nothing good could come of it. This was a disastrous way to talk. That was his unspoken message so far as champagne was concerned. After a long pause, he at last shook his head.
'I doubt if there is any champagne left, m'lord.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“However much one hears about individuals, the picture formed in the mind rarely approximates to the reality. So it was with Mrs Maclintick. I was not prepared for her in the flesh. When she opened the door to us, her formidable discontent with life swept across the threshold in scorching, blasting waves.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“Mrs Maclintick's dissatisfaction with life had probably reached so advanced a stage that she was unable to approach any new event amiably, even when proffered temporary alleviation of her own chronic spleen.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“What a shabby lot of highbrows have turned out tonight," he said, when he saw us. "It makes me ashamed to be one.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“Maclintick's calculatedly humdrum appearance, although shabby, seemed aimed at concealing bohemian affiliations.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“So often one thinks that individuals and situations cannot be so extraordinary as they seem from outside: only to find that the truth is a thousand times odder.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

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“What would have happened had he not been killed? He would certainly have had a rocky road to the nomination. The power of the Johnson administration and much of the party establishment was behind Humphrey. Still, the dynamism was behind Kennedy, and he might well have swept the convention. If nominated, he would most probably have beaten the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Individuals do make a difference to history. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have brought a quick end to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Those thousands of Americans—and many thousands more Vietnamese and Cambodians—who were killed from 1969 to 1973 would have been at home with their families. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have consolidated and extended the achievements of John Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The liberal tide of the 1960s was still running strong enough in 1969 to affect Nixon’s domestic policies. The Environmental Protection Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act with its CETA employment program were all enacted under Nixon. If that still fast-flowing tide so influenced a conservative administration, what signal opportunities it would have given a reform president! The confidence that both black and white working-class Americans had in Robert Kennedy would have created the possibility of progress toward racial reconciliation. His appeal to the young might have mitigated some of the under-thirty excesses of the time. And of course the election of Robert Kennedy would have delivered the republic from Watergate, with its attendant subversion of the Constitution and destruction of faith in government. RRK”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from Robert Kennedy and His Times

“if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being

“How about it, Skywalker? Will you still fight for me after we've been married for twenty-odd years?"
"What do you mean by 'still'? You do your own fighting. If I forget that, I'm not likely to survive until our twentieth anniversary."
Mara & Luke”
― Elaine Cunningham, quote from Dark Journey

“The part where you need to choose among the choices that are there, and not the ones that aren't there anymore. At least not how you need them to be. You're still stuck on some imaginary idea you have of how it could have been. You need to think about how it is now. And how you want it to be.”
― Laura Dave, quote from London is the Best City in America

“Today Lord I am going to do my best with Your help and for Your glory. I realize that there are many different people in the world with a variety of opinions and expectations. I will concentrate on being a God-pleaser and not a self-pleaser or man-pleaser. The rest I leave in Your hands lord. Grant me favor with You and with men and continue transforming me into the image of Your dear Son. Thank You Lord.”
― Joyce Meyer, quote from Beauty for Ashes: Receiving Emotional Healing

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