Anthony Powell Quotes

20 quotes in 282 categories

• Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil the promise of their early years.
• People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since…
• One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice…
• On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either…
• Books do furnish a room.
• It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
• There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
• Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
• I get a warm feeling among my books.
• One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to…
• When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold,…
• Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.
• I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books…
• Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.
• Self-love seems so often unrequited.
• He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Self-love seems so often…
• Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.
• Dinner at the Huntercombes possessed only two dramatic features: the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy
• Growing old's like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
• Parents - especially step parents, are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

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