The Soldier's Art Quotes

“Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward—in contrast with love—is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for example, come between Stringham and myself.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“I have absolutely no histrionic talent, none at all, a constitutional handicap in almost all undertakings of life;but then, after all, plenty of actors possess little enough.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“Like everything that's any good, it has about twenty different meanings.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“I want an immediate explanation of the infernal muddle your incompetence has made.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“Although, since days when we had been at school together, I had been seeing him on and off—very much on and off—for more than twenty years by this time, I found when I worked under him there were still comparatively unfamiliar sides to Widmerpool. Like most persons viewed through the eyes of a subordinate, his nature was to be appreciated with keener insight from below. This new angle of observation revealed, for example, how difficult he was to work with, particularly on account of a secretiveness that derived from perpetual fear, almost obsession, that tasks completed by himself might be attributed to the work of someone else. On that first morning at Division, Widmerpool spoke at length of his own methods. He was already sitting at his table when I arrived in the room. Removing his spectacles, he began to polish them vigorously, assuming at the same time a manner of hearty military geniality.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“Lovell was an odd mixture of realism and romanticism; more specifically, he was, like quite a lot of people, romantic about being a realist.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“Mr Deacon used to say nothing spread more ultimate gloom at a party than an exuberant manner which has roused false hopes.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“She could easily make matters more bizarre than embarrassing.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“That is one of the conceptions most difficult for stupid people to grasp. They always suppose some ponderable alteration will make the human condition more bearable. The only hope of survival is the realisation that no such thing could possibly happen.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“Everything alters, yet does remain the same. It might even improve matters.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“It was clear he had remained unflustered by recent public events, at the age he had reached perhaps disillusioned with the commonplaces of life; too keen a theatre-goer to spare time for any but the columns of dramatic criticism, however indifferently written, permitting no international crises from the news pages to cloud the keenness of aesthetic consideration. That was an understandable outlook.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“I have absolutely no histrionic talent, none at all, a constitutional handicap in almost all the undertakings of life; but then, after all, plenty of actors possess little enough.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art