Hearing Secret Harmonies Quotes

“People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical.”
― Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies

“To those familiar with the rhythm of living there are few surprises in this world.”
― Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies

“In its vulgar way, a painstaking piece of work, although one must always remember—something often forgotten today—that because things are generally known, they are not necessarily the better for being written down, or publicly announced. Some are, some aren't. As in everything else, good sense, taste, art, all have their place. Saying you prefer to disregard art, taste, good sense, does not mean that those elements do not exist—it merely means you lack them yourself”
― Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies

“A complicated situation appeared merely to be accumulating additional complicated factors.”
― Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies

“What you say, Nick, strengthens my contention that only a novel can imply certain truths impossible to state by exact definition. Biography and autobiography are forced to attempt exact definition. In doing so truth goes astray. The novelist is more serious—if that is the word.”
― Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies

“The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.”
― Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies

“TWO COMPENSATIONS FOR GROWING OLD are worth putting on record as the condition asserts itself. The first is a vantage point gained for acquiring embellishments to narratives that have been unfolding for years beside one's own, trimmings that can even appear to supply the conclusion of a given story, though finality is never certain, a dimension always possible to add.”
― Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies

“In any case fashions of one generation, moral or physical, are scarcely at all assessable in terms of another. They cannot be properly equated.”
― Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies

“Aggressive activities against crayfish might be, by definition, excluded from an afternoon's programme devoted to Harmony. Who could tell?”
― Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies

“Rusty wore jeans, Fiona a long skirt that swept the ground. Dragging its flounces across the damp grass, she looked like a mediaeval lady from the rubric of an illuminated Book of Hours, a remote princess engaged in some now obsolete pastime.”
― Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies