Anthony Powell · 793 pages
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“Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 4th Movement
“One’s capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 4th Movement
“In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 4th Movement
“Within this hollow bed of the stream the whole range of the quarry was out of sight, except for where the just visible peak of an escarpment of spoil shelved up to the horizon's mountainous coagulations of floating cottonwool, a density of white cloud perforated here and there by slowly opening and closing loopholes of the palest blue light.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 4th Movement
“For some reason Canon Fenneau made me feel a little uneasy. His voice might be soft, it was also coercive. He had small eyes, a large loose mouth, the lips thick, a somewhat receding chin. The eyes were the main feature. They were unusual eyes, not only almost unnaturally small, but vague, moist, dreamy, the eyes of a medium. His cherubic side, increased by a long slightly uptilted nose, was a little too good to be true, with eyes like that. In the manner in which he gave you all his attention there was a taste for mastery.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 4th Movement
“So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive to patiently and even vainly to analyse.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature
“Well, the world can go fuck itself.”
― Steven Erikson, quote from Reaper's Gale
“The most important thing I can add from my own observations is this: knowing it started from unremarkable circumstances should be a comfort to us all. Because it proves that you don’t need much to change the entire world for the better. You can start with the most ordinary ingredients. You can start with the world you’ve got.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Pay It Forward
“Disappointment is considered bad. A thoughtless prejudice. How, if not through disappointment, should we discover what we have expected and hoped for? And where, if not in this discovery, should self-knowledge lie? So how could one gain clarity about oneself without disappointment?
...
One could have the hope that he would become more real by reducing expectations, shrink to a hard, reliable core and thus be immune to the pain of disappointment. But how would it be to lead a life that banished every long, bold expectation, a life where there were only banal expectations like "the bus is coming"?”
― Pascal Mercier, quote from Night Train to Lisbon
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