Casanova's Chinese Restaurant Quotes

“I always think one ought to be grateful to an author if one has liked even a small bit of a book.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“You know a fact that strikes one very forcibly as one grows older is that some people are intelligent and some are stupid.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“I had no idea you had musical tastes, Nick. Why did you keep them from me all these years? Because I never asked, I suppose. One always finds the answer to everything in one’s own egotism.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“Wit, shrewdness about other aspects of life, grasp of the arts, fundamental good nature, none seemed any help in solving his emotional problems; to some extent these qualities, as displayed by him, were even a hindrance.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“One always finds the answer to everything in one’s own egotism.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“I know nothing of music,’ Barnby had, in turn, once remarked, ‘but Hugh Moreland’s accompaniment to that film sounded to me like a lot of owls quarrelling in a bicycle factory.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“In the end most things in life—perhaps all things—turn out to be appropriate.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“That answer was such a simple one that I could not imagine why I had not guessed it without having to be told. Those very obvious tactical victories are always the victories least foreseen by the onlooker, still less the opponent.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise. That happens at different moments in different careers.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“Maclintick did not answer. He removed the cork from a bottle, the slight ‘pop’ of its emergence appearing to em-body the material of a reply to his wife, at least all the reply he intended to give.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“A future marriage, or a past one, may be investigated and explained in terms of writing by one of its parties, but it is doubtful whether an existing marriage can ever be described directly in the first person and convey a sense of reality. Even those writers who suggest some of the substance of married life best, stylise heavily, losing the subtlety of the relationship at the price of a few accurately recorded, but isolated, aspects. To think at all objectively about one’s own marriage is impossible, while a balanced view of other people’s marriage is almost equally hard to achieve with so much information available, so little to be believed. Objectivity is not, of course, everything in writing; but, even after one has cast objectivity aside, the difficulties of presenting marriage are inordinate. Its forms are at once so varied, yet so constant, providing a kaleidoscope, the colours of which are always changing, always the same. The moods of a love affair, the contradictions of friendship, the jealousy of business partners, the fellow feeling of opposed commanders in total war, these are all in their way to be charted. Marriage, partaking of such – and a thousand more – dual antagonisms and participations, finally defies definition.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“For my own part, I liked Lady Warminster, although at the same time never wholly at ease in her presence. She was immaculately free from any of the traditional blemishes of a mother-in-law; agreeable always; entertaining; even, in her own way, affectionate; but always a little alarming: an elegant, deeply experienced bird – perhaps a bird of prey – ready to sweep down and attack from the frozen mountain peaks upon which she preferred herself to live apart.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“Perhaps not interested in the sense you mean,’ said Moreland, ‘but everyone likes being fallen in love with. People who pretend they don’t are always the ones, beyond all others, to wring the last drop of pleasure – usually sadistic pleasure – out of it.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“To hold a friend in the background at a certain stage of a love affair is a technique some men like to employ; a method which spreads, as it were, the emotional load, ameliorating risks of dual conflict between the lovers themselves, although at the same time posing a certain hazard in the undue proximity of a third party unencumbered with emotional responsibility – and therefore almost always seen to better advantage than the lover himself.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“I listened to what was being said without feeling – as I came to feel later – that I was, in one sense, part and parcel of the same community; that when people gossiped about matters like Carolo and his girl, one was listening to a morsel, if only an infinitesimal morsel, of one’s own life.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“Indeed, under his splenetic exterior Maclintick harboured all kind of violent, imperfectly integrated sentiments. Moreland, for example, impressed him, perhaps rightly, as a young man of matchless talent, ill equipped to face a materialistic world. At the same time, Maclintick’s own hag-ridden temperament also punished him for indulging in what he regarded as sentimentality. His tremendous disapproval of sexual inversion, encountered intermittently in circles he chose to frequent, was compensation for his own sense of guilt at this hero-worshipping of Moreland; his severity with Gossage, another effort to right the balance.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“Then Maclintick made that harrowing remark that established throughout all eternity his relationship with Moreland. ‘I obey you, Moreland,’ he said, ‘with the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“Yet, even allowing for these failings, was not St John Clarke still a person more like myself than anyone else sitting round the table? That was a sobering thought. He, too, for longer years, had existed in the imagination, even though this imagination led him (in my eyes) to a world ludicrously contrived, socially misleading, professionally nauseous. On top of that, had he not on this earlier occasion gone out of his way to speak a word of carefully hedged praise for my own work? Was that, therefore, an aspect of his critical faculty for which he should be given credit, or was it an even stronger reason for guarding against the possibility of corruption at the hands of one whose own writings could not be approved?”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“Did Chips mention when he and Priscilla are going to be married?’ asked Isobel.
The question reminded me that Moreland, at least in a negative manner, had taken another decisive step. I thought of his recent remark about the Ghost Railway. He loved these almost as much as he loved mechanical pianos. Once, at least, we had been on a Ghost Railway together at some fun fair or other on a seaside pier; slowly climbing sheer gradients, sweeping with frenzied speed into inky depths, turning blind corners from which black, gibbering bogeys leapt to attack, rushing headlong towards iron-studded doors, threatened by imminent collision, fingered by spectral hands, moving at last with dreadful, ever increasing momentum towards a shape that lay across the line.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“I could not remember the story with sufficient clarity.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“We were now in the midst of dangerous abstractions which might once more threaten further embarrassments of the kind I hoped to avoid.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“Contemplation of this banal maxim increased the depression that had suddenly descended on me.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“Soon after this meeting with the Morelands came the period of crisis leading up to the Abdication, one of those public events which occupied the minds not only of those dedicated by temperament to eternal discussion of what they read about in the newspapers, but of everyone else in the country of whatever age, sex, or social class. The constitutional and emotional issues were left threadbare by debate. Barnby would give his views on the controversy in his most down-to-earth manner; Roddy Cutts treated it with antiseptic discretion; Frederica’s connexion with the Court caused her to show herself in public as little as possible, but she did not wholly avoid persecution at the hands of friends and relations vainly hoping for some unreleased titbit.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“It is rather an occasion, darling,’ said Moreland, vexed at these objections. ‘After all, I am noted among composers for the smallness of my output. I don’t turn out a symphony every week like some people. A new work by me ought to be celebrated with a certain flourish—if only to encourage the composer himself.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“A fidelity extremely rare among one’s friends.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“Choosing the type of girl one likes is about the last thing left that one is allowed to approach subjectively. I shall continue to exercise the option.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

“There was a pause. Maclintick, unable to bear the sight and sound of these negotiations, had taken a notebook from his pocket and begun a deep examination of his own affairs; making plans for the future; writing down great thoughts; perhaps even composing music.”
― Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant