Anthony Powell · 715 pages
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“She glided away towards the lift, which seemed hardly needed, with its earthly and mechanical paraphernalia, to bear her up to the higher levels.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“In fact, she [Pamela Flitton] seemed to prefer 'older men' on the whole, possibly because of their potentiality for deeper suffering. Young men might superficially transcend their seniors in this respect, but they probably showed less endurance in sustaining that state, while, once pinioned, the middle-aged could be made to writhe almost indefinitely.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“There could be no doubt, so I was finally forced to decide, that the longer one dealt with them, the more one developed the habit of treating generals like members of the opposite sex; specifically, like ladies no longer young, who therefore deserve extra courtesy and attention; indeed, whose every whim must be given thought.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“Jeavon's thick dark hair, with its ridges of corkscrew curls, had now turned quite white, the Charlie Chaplin moustache remaining black. This combination of tones for some reason gave him an oddly Italian appearance, enhanced by blue overalls, obscurely suggesting a railway porter at a station in Italy.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“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.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“The army is at once the worst place for egoists, and the best.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“That was a good straightforward point of view, no pretence that games were anything but an outlet for power and aggression; no stuff about their being enjoyable as such. You played a game to demonstrate that you did it better than someone else. If it came to that, I thought how few people do anything for its own sake, from making love to practising the arts.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“Bring a torch, if you've got one. It's as dark as hell and stinks of something far worse than cheese.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep;”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“His woolly grey hair, short thick body, air of perpetual busyness, suggested an industrious gnome conscripted into the service of the army; a gnome who also liked to practise considerable malice against the race of men with whom he mingled, by making as complicated as possible every transaction they had to execute through himself.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“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.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
“All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer. • • • College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration. Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows. My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall.”
― Joey Graceffa, quote from In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World
“The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
“It’s a dark night, sang the kettle, and the rotten leaves are lying by the way; and, above, all is mist and darkness, and, below, all is mire and clay; and there’s only one relief in all the sad and murky air; and I don’t know that it is one, for it’s nothing but a glare; of deep and angry crimson, where the sun and wind together; set a brand upon the clouds for being guilty of such weather; and the widest open country is a long dull streak of black; and there’s hoar–frost on the finger–post, and thaw upon the track; and the ice it isn’t water, and the water isn’t free; and you couldn’t say that anything is what it ought to be; but he’s coming, coming, coming!—”
― Charles Dickens, quote from The Cricket on the Hearth
“From the beginning, the only thing I couldn’t tolerate about you was how impossible you were to ignore.”
― Jennifer DeLucy, quote from Seers of Light
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