The Military Philosophers Quotes

“Most people's sex life is a mystery, especially that of individuals who seem to make most parade of it. Such is the conclusion one finally arrives at.”
― Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers

“His own relations with the opposite sex took an exclusively commercial form.
‘I’ve never had a free poke in my life,’ he said. ‘Subject doesn’t seem to arise when you’re talking to a respectable woman.”
― Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers

“Matilda, looking decidedly smart in a dress of blue and black stripes, was standing beside her husband, talking with the Portuguese Ambassador.”
― Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers

“Not all the fruits of Victory are appetising to the palate,’ said Pennistone. ‘An issue of gall and wormwood has been laid on.”
― Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers

“This revelation of Duport's musical leanings showed how, as ever, people can always produce something unexpected about themselves.”
― Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers

“At the same time, a faint sense of disappointment superimposed on an otherwise absorbing inner experience was in its way suitably Proustian too: a reminder of the eternal failure of human life to respond a hundred per cent; to rise to the greatest heights without allowing at the same time some suggestion, however slight, to take shape in indication that things could have been even better.”
― Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers

“not required to stay late in the Whitehall area, I used, as a general routine, to come straight back from duty to a nearby pub, dine there, then retire to bed with a book. At that period the seventeenth century particularly occupied me, so that works like Wood's Athenae Oxonienses or Luttrell's Brief Relation opened up vistas of the past, if not necessarily preferable to one's own time, at least appreciably different. These historical readings could be varied with Proust.”
― Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers