Afternoon Men Quotes

“Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronised, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand. Later they dined at a restaurant quite near the flat.”
― Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men

“I don’t dislike him because he’s a Jew,’ said Mr. Nunnery. ‘One can’t dismiss whole races at a time.’ ‘He’s all right.’ ‘You’d hardly know he was a Jew.’ ‘Oh, no. Hardly at all.”
― Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men

“The Jew’s really the better-looking.”
― Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men

“ON his way out of the museum Atwater passed Nosworth, arguing in the evening sunshine with a party of negroes, who stood about him in ungainly positions, near in spirit to the Anglo-Saxon attitudes of First Messenger.”
― Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men

“I’m not a religious chap. I don’t know anything about that sort of thing. But there must be something beyond all this sex business.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You think so?’ ‘Oh yes. Quite likely. Why not?’ ‘But what?’ ‘I can’t help.’ ‘You can’t.”
― Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men

“Atwater gave the boy twopence and began to bite the apple. It was green and tasted of absolutely nothing. It was like eating material in the abstract.”
― Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men

“   The barman came to the other side of the counter.
   "Time please," he said.
   Harriet said: "You mustn't hurry a lady drinking a pint of beer. The effects might be fatal.”
― Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men

“   Susan poured herself out some more wine. She said:
   "You're nice. You must come and see me some time. I live miles away from anywhere with my father. You'll like him."
   "Tell me about him."
   "He's a curious little man with a walrus moustache."
   "What does he do?"
   "He's a failure."
   "Where does he fail?"
   "Oh, he doesn't any longer," she said. "He's a retired failure, you see. You must meet him."
   "I'd like to.”
― Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men

“Some of the best of us are quite unambitious.”
― Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men

“Her expression was oafish, but it was on the whole this quality that gave her face a certain retentive efficacy. She had the look of a gnome or prematurely vicious child. But underneath the suggestion of peculiar knowingness an apparent and immense credulity lurked.”
― Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men

“He was a weedy-looking young man with straw-coloured hair and rather long legs, who had failed twice for the Foreign Office. He sometimes wore tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles to correct a slight squint, and through influence he had recently got a job in a museum. His father was a retired civil servant who lived in Essex, where he and his wife kept a chicken farm.”
― Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men