Anthony Powell · 722 pages
Rating: (1.2K votes)
“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
Anthony Powell
Born place: in Westminster, The United Kingdom
Born date December 21, 1905
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“It was the most banal idea about a war, Michael knew, that if of fatality, but it was impossible not to think of it, impossible not to think of the casual threads of accident on which we survive to face the next if that comes tomorrow.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“Oh! the un-thought-of imaginations, frights, fears, and terrors, that are affected by a thorough application of guilt yielding to desperation! This is the man that hath his dwelling among the tombs with the dead; that is always crying out, and cutting himself with stones. Mark v. 1, 2, 3. But, I say, all in vain; desperation will not comfort him, the old covenant will not save him: nay, heaven and earth shall pass away, before one jot or tittle of the word and law of grace will fail or be removed. ”
― John Bunyan, quote from Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
“As a librarian, saving lives and worlds isn't in my purview, although if I could put those on my resume with a straight face, I would. Saving minds, however … perhaps it's not as farfetched. A mind can be lost without its owner's death. A mind that no longer questions only fulfills the rudimentary aspects of its function. A mind without wonder is a mere engine, a walking parasympathetic nervous system, seeing without observing, reacting without thinking, a forgotten ghost in a passive machine.”
― Josh Hanagarne, quote from The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family
“Seldom do people think things through foolishly. More often, they do not bother to think things through at all, so that even brainy individuals can reach untenable conclusions because their brainpower means little if it is not deployed and applied.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
“If you think a thing is impossible,you'll only make it impossible.”
― Bruce Lee, quote from Tao of Jeet Kune Do
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