A Dance to the Music of Time Quotes

“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 time in the closest intimacy.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“Do you think love flourishes at Stourwater?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Moreland. ‘Love means such different things to different people.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“An exceedingly well-informed report,' said the General. 'You have given yourself the trouble to go into matters thoroughly, I see. That is one of the secrets of success in life.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“In any case, I had been one of them. If her lovers were horrifying, I too had been of their order. That had to be admitted. ‘It is no good pontificating,’ Mr Deacon used to say, ‘about other people’s sexual tastes.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“Reason is given to all men, but all men do not know how to use it. Liberty is offered to each one of us, but few learn to be free. Such gifts are, in any case, a right to be earned, not a privilege for the shiftless.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“As a child you are in some ways more acutely aware of what people feel about one another than you are when childhood has come to an end.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“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, 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, 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, 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, A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“In books, you love somebody and want them, win them or lose them. In real life, so often, you love them and don’t want them, or want them and don’t love them.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“There seemed no particular object in avoiding banality from the start, as the evening showed every sign of developing into a banal one.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“One always imagines things happen in hot blood,’ he said. ‘An ill-considered remark starts a row. Hard words follow, misunderstandings. Matters that can be put right in the end. Unfortunately life doesn’t work out like that. First of all there is no row, secondly, nothing can be put right.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“Love is at once always absurd and never absurd; the more grotesque its form, the more love itself confers a certain dignity on the circumstances of those it torments.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“I understood very clearly that something was required of me, but could not guess what I was expected to do. Some persons, knowing that they were later going to ask a favour, would have made themselves more agreeable when a favour was being asked of them. That was not Widmerpool’s way. I almost admired him for making so little effort to conceal his lack of interest in my own affairs, while waiting his time to demand something of myself.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“Lady Warminster was a woman among women,’ said Mrs Erdleigh. ‘I shall never forget her gratitude when I revealed to her that Tuesday was the best day for the operation of revenge.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“The physical surroundings of most individuals, left to their own choice, vary little wherever they happen to live. No doubt that was the explanation. I was in the presence of one of those triumphs of mind over matter, like the photographer’s power of imposing his own personal visual demands on the subject photographed.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“The exercise of powerful ‘charm’ is, in any case, more appreciated in public than in private life, exacting, as it does, almost as heavy demands on the receiver as the transmitter, demands often too onerous to be weighed satisfactorily against the many other, all too delicate, requirements of married life.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“After you knew him, he must have moved further to the Left – or would it be to the Right? Extremes of policy have such a tendency to merge.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“All right,’ said Moreland, ‘love, then. Is it better to love somebody and not have them, or have somebody and not love them? I mean from the point of view of action – living intensely. Does action consist in having or loving? In having – naturally – it might first appear. Loving is just emotion, not action at all. But is that correct? I’m not sure.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“The two of them might have met on that high place deliberately for public celebration of some rite or sacrifice. At first neither said a word. That seemed an age. At last Dr Trelawney took the initiative. Raising his right arm slightly, he spoke in a low clear voice, almost in the accents of one whose very perfect enunciation indicates that English is not his native tongue.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“If forced to offer an exposé of any given situation, he was always in favour of presenting the substance of what he had to say in terms more or less oracular. Nothing in life – such was his view – must ever be thought of as easy of access. There is something to be said for that approach. Certainly few enough things in life are easy. On the other hand, human affairs can become even additionally clouded with obscurity if the most complicated forms of definition are always deliberately sought.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“He did his best to conceal this antipathy, because the one thing he hated, more than constituted authority itself, was to hear constituted authority questioned by anyone but himself. This is perhaps an endemic trait in all who love power, and my father had an absolute passion for power, although he was never in a position to wield it on a notable scale.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“He was saddled with the equally serious military – indeed, also civilian – handicap of chronic inability to be obsequious to superiors in rank, particularly when he found them uncongenial.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“Verbal description of everything, however, must remain infinitely distant from the thing itself, overstatement and understatement sometimes hitting off the truth better than a flat assertion of bare fact.”
― Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

“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, 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, 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, A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement