Books Do Furnish a Room Quotes

“Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.”
― Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room

“I was thinking the other day that hypochondria's a stepbrother to masochism,' said Hugo.”
― Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room

“Life becomes more and more like an examination where you have to guess the questions as well as the answers. I'd long decided there were no answers. I'm beginning to suspect there aren't really any questions either, none at least of any consequence, even the old perennial, whether or not to stay alive.”
― Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room

“Inevitably her sickness at Thrubworth had developed into a legend of pregnancy, cut short artificially and not occasioned by her husband, but that was probably myth.”
― Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room

“An important aspect of writing unmentioned by Burton was ‘priority'; what to tell first. That always seemed one of the basic problems.”
― Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room

“The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.”
― Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room

“Short's power to define feminine beauty abandoned him at this point. He simply made a gesture with his hand.”
― Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room

“Youth, dumb with embarrassment, breathless with exhibitionism, stuttering with nerves, inarticulate with conceit; the socially flamboyant, the robustly brawny, the crudely uninstructed, the palely epicene; one and all had obediently leapt through the hoop at Sillery's ringmaster behest; one and all submitted themselves to the testing flame of this burning fiery furnace of adolescent experience.”
― Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room

“A residuum of the experience was inevitable.”
― Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room