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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“I'm talkin' about you. Stop pretending you're normal. You're insane. Make that work for you.”
― Jennifer Crusie, quote from Agnes and the Hitman
“She smelled of deep, dark things and untold secrets and all of what she was keeping from me.”
― Nova Ren Suma, quote from Imaginary Girls
“He says when your grandmother died your mother cried solidly for a week, solidly.
She was crying with relief he says, it was like as if a door had been unlocked and she'd been let outside, she said to me I'm safe now.
He waits, and he says this kid, when it's born, you mustn't ever let it think it's anything other than a gift and a blessing, do you hear me?”
― Jon McGregor, quote from If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
“Paths are so much clearer when people stop looking at what everyone else is doing and instead concentrate on themselves.”
― Cecelia Ahern, quote from The Gift
“Much ingenious interpretation of story is little more than seeing pleasing patterns in the sparks of a fire, but it does no harm.”
― Philip Pullman, quote from Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
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